My wife is currently in the Marshall Islands commemorating an anniversary related to the nuclear testing. The trauma and fallout, cultural and nuclear, persists to this day - over 7 decades (and how many generations?) since the Bravo test.
I've heard and read a lot about the atrocities visited upon the Marshallese in the name of research in the last six months. Including around the potential "intentionality" of the human testing [1]. It is harrowing. And a hard pill to swallow in any context. The Nolan film did the islands little justice.
As an aside: while indirect, the journey to the Marshalls isn't as onorous as the article suggests - yes there's an island hopper, but United also fly direct from Honolulu. Though getting to Bikini is likely another adventure in itself.
> Including around the potential "intentionality" of the human testing
The wikipedia link mentions allegations, but not what (I feel) counts as evidence. Note that I'm not denying that the US Government engaged in radiation test programmes (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens), nor that these were covered up and are ethically questionable. But can such a rumour be falsified?
When it comes to the most powerful weapon in the world special at that time There is little to none consideration for nature and people. Would you rather own the most powerful weapon and be the most powerful state or consider life’s of other people?
"Would you rather own the most powerful weapon and be the most powerful state or consider life’s of other people?"
Have you considered developing weapons and power seeking while considering the lives of other people?
As it turned out there was still a consideration of other people. For example if Nazi Germany got the bomb first then many more people would have been miserable.
The Marshall Islands tests were carried out after the end of WWII.
It's worth considering that the US also used the islands as a dumping ground for waste from previous tests in the US [1] ... At a site which is now under threat of leaking due to the effects of climate change [2]
You really can't make this up. We have geological formations within our territory that are both incredibly stable as well as located within a dry climate. Yet we choose to use one of the least stable locations in terms of both geology, surrounding environment, and weather available to us.
I think the only way you could top this would be to place a vault at ground level that spanned the San Andreas fault.
> We have geological formations within our territory that are both incredibly stable as well as located within a dry climate.
Even more comical is that it's not like we didn't think of that because we literally do use that space for those reasons. We just also decided to fill the atoll with large amounts of nuclear waste... Seemingly for fun. To give the benefit of the doubt, for transportation logistics reasons.
“… the soil and the lagoon water surrounding the structure now contain a higher level of radioactivity than the debris of the dome itself, so even in the event of a total collapse, the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population or marine environment should not change significantly.”
It's a reasonable question. I think the linked wiki article addresses it though. There are at least concerns about ground water contamination and about heavy metals.
If dilution is so straightforward then why wasn't the waste mixed with a large volume of sea water and then dumped far out at sea to begin with? That probably would have been cheaper.
I read this several times as C-4 not C-14 and was very curious how one would date the age of living cells with plastic explosives. I think I need more coffee.
Sorry, say what? C-14 comes from exposure to radiation also from the sun. Dating by it would make no sense in recent history because it would be too hard. Am I missing something?
This graph [1] available on Wikipedia answers this question. The level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere (in the southern hemisphere) roughly doubled between 1955 and 1963 ish. This coincides with the era of above ground nuclear testing. Since then it has been decaying back to the baseline.
Indeed, I may have misread the GP comment, understanding that it stated that C-14 appeared because of the nuclear tests. They may have meant the addition. I did try to correct my mistake by answering my own question...
I only learned last year that you can dive the atomic fleet [1][2]. What is the atomic fleet? As part of the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, they dragged a bunch of WW2 ships (from both the US and Japan) and detonated bombs above them to test how effective such weapons were at sinking ships.
As part of this, you can often get to set foot on Bikini Atoll, something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay a few hours to stay below radiation thresholds.
A whole bunch of people used to live there but were essentially bullied into leaving and now essentially live as refugess, still unable to return [3].
> something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay a few hours to stay below radiation thresholds.
As one learns by reading the linked article, radiation levels on the island are either equal to or below the levels that aircraft passengers are exposed to at 35k feet. Just don't eat the coconuts or crabs.
> As one learns by reading the linked article, radiation levels on the island are either equal to or below the levels that aircraft passengers are exposed to at 35k feet.
Not really sure what you're asking. Time spent in an airplane passes at the same rate as time spent on an island. One hour on either is an equivalent dose.
I think that harmful effects of radiation in places like that matter mostly in the context of life expectancy and the well-being of individual organisms (that may be unlucky to e.g. ingest some particularly radiating matter and quickly die), but not the general growth of the population. Higher cancer rates may not matter much if the organisms that get cancer can reproduce before they die. Compared to other types of pollution and other human-related dangers to wildlife, some level of radiation isn't that harmful to nature.
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc.
This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem.
To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.
I only personally know one person who had been an active member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of their members opinion, they just have a much stricter view on what sustainable growth is (and that some degrowth might be needed to achieve sustainable growth in the long term).
The Sustainable Development Index had Cuba and Equador as the sole sustainable economies in years past.
There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.
> There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.
What if there is 200% tariffs on junk they shouldn't be buying anyhow? What if a new car becomes so expensive that the idea of having to replace it in 3-5/years induces outrage and class action lawsuits? What if you were only allowed to own one residence? What if out of season foods were fantastically expensive unless you had a community "garden"?
I know, HN, straight to -4. I'll meet you down there.
People would correctly identify that their standard of living is being reduced for ideological reasons without tangible individual benefits and would likely not respond well to that, resulting in a loss of political power for whatever movement instituted those policies and a reversal of said policies.
People went with the green bin initiative in the US, perhaps elsewhere. we switched to more fuel efficient cars in general when fuel became more expensive. New home construction and retrofits to make houses fully electric - no gas hobs, not gas furnace. these were all "QOL" adjustments that people have been making.
You have to pitch things the correct way, and it would really help if it wasn't treated as an "Ideological" thing but an ecological and humanitarian thing.
It is not okay to shove our pollution, poor wages and working conditions, and so on, to another country, nor its population. Arguing that it's okay if Chinese and vietnamese and indian folks are treated poorly, have poor health outcomes, and so on, just so long as we get shein and temu and amazon and walmart...
The "there's plenty for everyone, consume buy purchase, it's ok!" is just a lie. you can't do that without harming someone else.
If for some unimaginable reason the western world had embraced this philosophy wholeheartedly in 1985, literally billions of people would be struggling in grinding poverty (or worse!) instead of living significantly better lives than their parents or grandparents.
i don't know, you tell me. And billions are in poverty now so i'm not sure this is a productive conversation. 44.9% of the global population is under $6.85 per day. 740mm try to survive on less than $2.15 a day.
45% of the earth's population is 3,700,000,000 or so, which, if my counting of commas is correct, is "literally billions of people"
> Three-quarters of all people in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa or in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
The people in extreme poverty are not the people you are making the argument for. Changing your consumption isn't going to do a thing for sub Saharan Africa and latin America, as a matter of fact increasing consumption of goods from those countries will improve their quality of life.
If you are ever in South Africa contact me, really. I'll take you to those people in povery, tell them yourself how you think Americans spending less money is going to change their lives in any way.
You will probably find some peoplewho are just trying their best to make it through the day. You will also find a lot of their lack of wealth comes from a lack of education.
You want to make a lasting difference, stop donating to feel good charities or animals or nonsense. Find an organisation that is focussed on improving education in these areas and donate to that.
Because nothing kills corrupt governments quite like an educated voting base.
"see, rampant consumerism is good for the people in sub-saharan africa! it's okay to buy disposable land-fill!"
another way to look at this is, we export our pollution to another country until their citizens get tired of the pollution, and thus charge more for production. So we pull up stakes and move on to the next country that's too poor to complain.
But i guess bootstrapping economies by dumping toxins everywhere on the planet is ok.
The goal should be to bootstrap sustainable, clean technologies, not the same 1800s era industrialization that coats the land in a fine sheen of toxic waste.
More importantly, a lot of it was hidden from view. Your washing machine and laundry detergent might be not as good as 30 years ago, but... do you know that for sure? And when did that happen? Maybe you're just imagining it.
Your old home had a gas furnace, and then you bought new construction and it's all-electric. Did the government do this? Are you even gonna think about it when making an offer? Your bill is gonna be higher, but how much of it is just because it's a different home?
And even then... you get away with it for a while, and then it all of sudden becomes a political talking point.
Case in point, at some point people realized what was going on with pickup trucks in the US.
> do you know that for sure?
Yes. I absolutely loathe modern washing machines. The irony is that they don't actually save any water because I end up running them multiple times. One of these days I will hopefully get around to gutting mine to replace the control box with an RPi. It's a lot of busy work for something that ought to function well to begin with.
> Your bill is gonna be higher,
Maybe not with a modern mini-split setup. Those are genuinely better than anything that came before them. As a bonus, they remove the failure mode of "blow up your house" that all gas appliances inherently carry.
You can also power them with solar, removing your day to day reliance on the grid.
> The irony is that they don't actually save any water because I end up running them multiple times.
i have an HE2 (which everyone, universally hates) and it cleans clothes fine with 1 load where you can't even see the top of the water most of the time. You have to load high efficiency top loading machines different than your grandparents loaded their speed queens. You must not put anything over the impeller. everything must go around the edges before the water starts. the impellers in HE washers don't agitate around the torus of the tub, they agitate like the electric field on a torus around the tub, so they go bottom, bottom middle, upper middle, upper, upper outer, bottom outer, bottom; in a loop. if you put stuff in the middle to start, it'll just swish that back and forth and never clean anything. Sometimes stuff won't even get wet, or you'll have dried soap stuck to your clothes.
secondly, don't use fabric softener. If you must use something because of your water quality, use vinegar.
If you need to wash sheets, curtains, blankets, comforters and the like, you can't put them around the outside, because the HE washers do that cycle differently, too. You have to gather the fabric like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindle sack, start with the sheet or whatever flat, fold all four corners (or whatever) into the middle so they all meet in the middle. Then pick it up by the four corners (or whatever) and place it in the washer with the middle of the sheet down and the four corners on top. Like a bindle sack. use the "sheets / heavy duty" cycle for sheets and the like. that's what it's for.
this is the big joke, i always score real high up on the 2-axis political tests; because i believe with good science, eschewing "oligarch" money, and getting corruption down real low, a proper government should be fairly draconian about things that affect everyone. So making it illegal to just drain oil from a car onto the street, that's authoritarian. Mandating that used oil must be returned to a "recycling facility", even if that facility just makes bunker oil and heating oil from it - that is also authoritarian.
Yes, there is a need to stop the small minority of humans that will not be good stewards of the planet, the people and creatures on it, and its atmosphere. I'm fine with being labelled an authoritarian.
oh and to answer a possible question about "what is 'good science'", i'd start with looking at scientists that have been doing science for at least a couple of decades, with no factual retractions on their record, or on the record of those they mentored (those who actually wrote the papers?). As an ancillary - their work must be reproducible, ideally by an competing institution - and it should go both ways. if Harvard always poo-poos UC Davis' research publications, then they shouldn't be surprised if the CSU and UC systems scrutinize Harvard's work especially.
to analogize to something i often hear, "We already have laws about that, just enforce them" - we already know what outstanding, excellent science looks like. Reinforce that.
on https://www.mapmypolitics.org/ i show as a lower left centrist, maybe 1 question away from "social Libertarian". I answered as though i were running the country, not as though i were living under the country i was describing. So questions where an answer is my ideal, but is impossible under the current system i answered that way. "Trade should be regulated to prevent unfair competition" was my answer, because "we pay our slaves - er... workers - 5 cents a day and don't care if they die" is unfair competition, to my reasoning. so is "we can provide cheap goods because we pollute the air, land and water, and ship cheap stuff to other countries they 'want' and pollute their air, land, and water, too." A couple examples, there.
You either convince them or the "security tax on walls, borders, etc." becomes a burden that ends it one way or another. One does not get a choice on the flavor of situationalphysics.
I think this is probably a misrepresentation of degrowth. Perhaps there are some that take an extreme view like that, but it is more that we are very very obviously beyond the limits of sustainable living and something will have to give, now, or worse in the future as we deplete even more resources.
Some of these differences won't be "degrowth" but changes, like shifting to high speed rail and buses over personal cars. Reducing meat in our diets. Giving nature some breathing room. In other words, a different way of living that might take some adjustment but would also be perfectly fine.
Furthermore, we need to consider developing societies. If we continue to consume finite natural resources unsustainably, we cut into the share that could be used to better the lives of the poorest societies on Earth.
I'm not involved in XR though. However, I think it's important to present a highly materialist viewpoint. It's not only about morality, but about ensuring as many people as possible can live decent lives in a renewed balance with nature.
Its funny how every economist would instantly recognise what needs to be done if we weren’t talking about the climate but a publicly traded company. Imagine the company is spending a whole lot more than it is making revenue; they still have a lot of cash reserves, but it’s clear the current business can’t just continue for much longer.
What do you do? Obviously, the first thing you do is make sure the expenses go down. Cut down the unnecessary, slim every operation to what is really required, stabilise the curve so the slope becomes less steep.
Only then can you start thinking of investments in increasing efficiency by means of technology or long shots.
All of this carries over to humanity; we need to achieve a sustainable curve.
The oddest thing about this to me is that they don't seem to think through what exactly this implies.
If one truly believes in the need to reduce human population then by far the highest margin things are not things like preserving a few hundred year old forest in England, but mass introduction of contraceptives to the DRC. It'll be places like Nigeria and Congo that dominate in terms of number of humans next century, not dying Europe (whose resource usage will decline even faster as fertility free falls), and those countries are not going to remain low resource consumption for too long.
Yup, but those two countries alone are still going to hit 1.5 billion combined at current rates (DRC has 6.05 TFR declining at 0.05 per decade), momentum is key. And if they attain European rates of resource consumption then by that point they'll be by far the biggest "problem" as far as "degrowthers" are concerned.
And unlike, say, India, getting that number down is much easier (people resist being killed, but freely distributed contraceptives would likely by welcomed by women).
Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to compete.
If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in.
And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inevitably cut corners to make as much of a profit for their shareholders, and accidents will happen. Also, there's proliferation risk. No, nuclear material from power plants isn't useable for nuclear bombs but it is for dirty bombs.
If we do it, it should be state managed like the military. We don't let commercial parties play around with nuclear bombs. Why should they be trusted with power plants that contain a hell of a lot more nuclear material?
Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. That should be the #1 goal, and the base load met by power storage. Only by nukes if there's no other way.
Anyway that's my opinion as an environmental type.
Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff.
Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond being merely detectable. There’s so much mercury in the oceans that it’s unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came from burning coal. An entire category of food poisoned planetwide!
"Detecting Fukishima" from North America was no mean feat .. it was akin to hearing the footfall of an ant several miles away.
The radiometric procedure here was (IIRC) replace a large number of air filter mats in a large number of HVAC units and after a week to cycle them back and then reduce the "contaminated" mats down to samples that sat within highly sensitive high crystal volume spectrometers for 72 hours or more.
The 'normal' environmental radiation event count level in 40 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation Crystals (if that's what was used) at some 80m above ground level is between one and two thousand events per second.
The Fukishima signature gamma events came to a few thousand in 72 hours (again, IIRC) whch had to be teased out from a flood of other events many magnitudes greater in count.
Absolutely not enough to be concerned about, but a seriously interesting bit of detection work.
And if nuclear became the default clean energy technology, it would have to be shared worldwide. Every country with the same issues, but varying levels of competence, political alignment, terror risks etc. do we want 100 000 nuclear power stations?
(Edit: although maybe thorium might shift the calculation.)
Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase damage/kWh.
> its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic
Ostrich Worship -- using detection limits as a proxy for harm -- implicitly promotes damage that is difficult to quantify over damage that is easy to detect in the most minute quantities. It elevates burying your head in the sand into a principle. The fact that nuclear pollution can be detected in mind-bendingly minute quantities is a very dumb reason to be anti-nuclear.
> one incident can cause so much of it
Headline Bias is usually something people aim to avoid rather than celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of slip-and-fall accidents from contractors running around rooftops can't reasonably be rounded to 0 on account of being individually "boring," yet that's what you do when you focus on the biggest incident. Speaking of which, do you oppose hydro-power on the basis of the Banqiao Dam disaster?
> Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
Single Ended Comparisons are the root of all evil. PV cells and windmills don't pop into existence without side effects. Their big problem is that you need a lot of them to generate electricity, leading to a lot of side effects.
> I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is.
It's not. Or it wasn't. I'm extremely relieved that after 50 years we finally found a low-CO2 power solution that self-styled greens don't fight tooth and nail, and on that count solar and wind are unbeatable. But we had the solution. We could have been done phasing out CO2-emitting sources if we had just kept up the pace on nuclear rollout. Instead, we have just begun. The 50 gigatons excess CO2 emissions (so far, USA only) in order to wait for solar and wind to become economical were an absolute travesty.
What is this baaed on, vibes? I don't see an official position on nuclear power from XR. All I can find is discussions like this where people discuss a diversity of views about nuclear power.
Extinction rebellion is focused on forcing politicians to take climate change seriously and make urgent policy changes. If politicians want to meet them with "we are taking this seriously, we're making a massive investment into nuclear power" they're free to do so.
The comment spoke about nuclear power accidents; neither Three mile island, Fukishima, nor Chernobyl wiped out all (or even a significant number) of existing lifeforms.
Bikini Atoll was blasted with 23 (or 24, there's an edge case) separate nuclear explosions in the air, at sea level, and underwater, one a thousand times more powerful than either of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons.
Not comparable to a nuclear power station accident.
“The method has been used for everything from measuring the age of ringless trees in the Amazon to examining whether humans generate new olfactory bulb neurons into adulthood”
Imagine you lived literally in paradise on the most beautiful Pacific atoll - an utterly gorgeous place of peace and serenity and happiness.
Literally heaven, surrounded by the most beautiful ocean, reefs and fish.
Imagine then they turn up, round you up, take you off your island and send you somewhere else to live forever, taking your home from you.
Then they nuke that island repeatedly so it can never be lived on again and is now one the of the most polluted and radioactive and toxic places on earth.
Pristine perfect beauty converted to unliveable toxic hell for humans and animals.
I'm not excusing or justifying any actions here, but thinking from a 1946 perspective: the second world war had just ended and we all know about the horrible losses that happened there, both military and civilian. This new hugely destructive weapon has just been developed. The Soviet Union is also developing the weapon, with an unhinged paranoid madman as its absolute leader. Everyone can see the outline of an arms race developing (with the second world war very fresh in memory).
In that context, relocating 167 people to another island within the same country/cultural region barely registers.
Again, I'm not justifying anything, but if I had been around at the time, I'm not sure I would have cared either.
The place looks nice but there is not much there to make human life easy or nice: not much soil for agriculture or herds, not much shade, no fresh water, no resources to build anything, ...
The Scots were driven off their land by other Scots, though. In addition, comparing subsistence agriculture in a land where you can freeze to death with the absolute abundance of food provided by a tropical island seems a stretch. Having spent considerable time in both the Scottish Highlands -- where my wider family is centered -- and having lived on a tropical island for a few years, it takes a particularly romantic eye to try and make this comparison.
> the absolute abundance of food provided by a tropical island
There is no absolute abundance of food on an atoll. There’s fish, coconuts and precious little ground for anything else to grow. It can be sustainable if the populations are very small, and then turn to hell quickly if they are not.
there's plenty of paradise like islands in the pacific. you could move all the canadians to siberia's tundra and they'd probably do well.
devil's advocate: GODZILLA and all the excitement and joy the franchise gave people would not be as much a thing without the US trying to blow bikini atoll off aerial maps.
It appears that it was published on medium and subsequently added to the standfordmag site, hence the 2 links to it they're and the notice that new articles are published there. It probably just remains because they have no control over medium, so they can't turn the page into a permanent redirect, and they don't want to just take it down and break links.
I do wonder why people still publish on Medium. There was a time when Medium probably (for no particular reason carried credibility (for no partucularly good reason over a random blog post. But these days the negatives seem like they outweigh any small positives.
It's still the least bad way to just write something and put it on the internet in a way that looks non-awful. For people whose focus is the content, not the, uh, medium, it still makes sense.
I guess I won't really argue. The appearance is good and, if you don't want your own blog (which is still more work to setup than it should be unless you're a web designer or pay someone), I suppose Medium is a reasonable option.
If I may go off-topic, I wonder why the “Standford” spelling is such a common typo? Is there a linguistic reason for it, or is it some sort of infectious meme?
It's possible it's QWERTY-related as a sibling suggests, but there's also precedent for this specific kind of sound change in many dialects of English: /d/ is a stop consonant, which are commonly inserted in the middle of a nasal (/n/) and fricative (/f/), and in particular /d/ is produced with the tip of the tongue the same way that /n/ is, so it and /t/ (the unvoiced variant) are the most likely stop consonants to be inserted after /n/.
I mean typing it slowly, left ring finger 's', left pointer finger 't', left pinky 'a', right pointer 'n', then because 'f' and 'd' are so close on a qwerty keyboard any sloppiness between the left pointer and middle finger sitting on the 'd', 'f' would mean the d gets hit first as you roll into the 'f', seems pretty easy to make
You must have missed it. All this is mentioned at the very top of the linked page. The article was published in this Medium and then they moved to stanfordmag.org.
> We’ve moved! Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on Stanfordmag.org.
My wife is currently in the Marshall Islands commemorating an anniversary related to the nuclear testing. The trauma and fallout, cultural and nuclear, persists to this day - over 7 decades (and how many generations?) since the Bravo test.
I've heard and read a lot about the atrocities visited upon the Marshallese in the name of research in the last six months. Including around the potential "intentionality" of the human testing [1]. It is harrowing. And a hard pill to swallow in any context. The Nolan film did the islands little justice.
As an aside: while indirect, the journey to the Marshalls isn't as onorous as the article suggests - yes there's an island hopper, but United also fly direct from Honolulu. Though getting to Bikini is likely another adventure in itself.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_4.1
> Including around the potential "intentionality" of the human testing
The wikipedia link mentions allegations, but not what (I feel) counts as evidence. Note that I'm not denying that the US Government engaged in radiation test programmes (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens), nor that these were covered up and are ethically questionable. But can such a rumour be falsified?
When it comes to the most powerful weapon in the world special at that time There is little to none consideration for nature and people. Would you rather own the most powerful weapon and be the most powerful state or consider life’s of other people?
"Would you rather own the most powerful weapon and be the most powerful state or consider life’s of other people?" Have you considered developing weapons and power seeking while considering the lives of other people?
Just the fact that you ask that question as though it makes sense is an indictment.
The implication is that nothing matters more than being “most powerful”. What a sad, sad way to view life.
> What a sad, sad way to view life.
It’s sad until one realises that this is what human nature is. It’s “us” or “them” regardless of how much we all wanted that it wasn’t so.
As it turned out there was still a consideration of other people. For example if Nazi Germany got the bomb first then many more people would have been miserable.
The greater good
The Marshall Islands tests were carried out after the end of WWII.
It's worth considering that the US also used the islands as a dumping ground for waste from previous tests in the US [1] ... At a site which is now under threat of leaking due to the effects of climate change [2]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-te...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runit_Island
You really can't make this up. We have geological formations within our territory that are both incredibly stable as well as located within a dry climate. Yet we choose to use one of the least stable locations in terms of both geology, surrounding environment, and weather available to us.
I think the only way you could top this would be to place a vault at ground level that spanned the San Andreas fault.
> We have geological formations within our territory that are both incredibly stable as well as located within a dry climate.
Even more comical is that it's not like we didn't think of that because we literally do use that space for those reasons. We just also decided to fill the atoll with large amounts of nuclear waste... Seemingly for fun. To give the benefit of the doubt, for transportation logistics reasons.
From the second wiki article:
“… the soil and the lagoon water surrounding the structure now contain a higher level of radioactivity than the debris of the dome itself, so even in the event of a total collapse, the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population or marine environment should not change significantly.”
This is just insane.
Why would leaking matter? The ocean will dilute the leakage to irrelevance (recall that there's 4 billion tons of Uranium already in the ocean).
It's a reasonable question. I think the linked wiki article addresses it though. There are at least concerns about ground water contamination and about heavy metals.
If dilution is so straightforward then why wasn't the waste mixed with a large volume of sea water and then dumped far out at sea to begin with? That probably would have been cheaper.
> Why would leaking matter?
Go and see for yourself. /s
> The greater good
Arguably the lesser bad in this case!
The note about using C-14 (introduced from nuclear blasts) to date the age of living cells is fascinating.
I read this several times as C-4 not C-14 and was very curious how one would date the age of living cells with plastic explosives. I think I need more coffee.
Sorry, say what? C-14 comes from exposure to radiation also from the sun. Dating by it would make no sense in recent history because it would be too hard. Am I missing something?
Answering my own question, after rereading TFA. It's more because the C-14 was doubled and not because C-14 did not exist before.
This graph [1] available on Wikipedia answers this question. The level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere (in the southern hemisphere) roughly doubled between 1955 and 1963 ish. This coincides with the era of above ground nuclear testing. Since then it has been decaying back to the baseline.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#/media/File%3ARadioc...
Indeed, I may have misread the GP comment, understanding that it stated that C-14 appeared because of the nuclear tests. They may have meant the addition. I did try to correct my mistake by answering my own question...
I only learned last year that you can dive the atomic fleet [1][2]. What is the atomic fleet? As part of the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, they dragged a bunch of WW2 ships (from both the US and Japan) and detonated bombs above them to test how effective such weapons were at sinking ships.
As part of this, you can often get to set foot on Bikini Atoll, something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay a few hours to stay below radiation thresholds.
A whole bunch of people used to live there but were essentially bullied into leaving and now essentially live as refugess, still unable to return [3].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5bKzTbHu4A
[2]: https://www.scubadoctor.com.au/article-diving-the-nuclear-fl...
[3]: https://thebikiniproject.org/the-bikini-people/
> something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay a few hours to stay below radiation thresholds.
As one learns by reading the linked article, radiation levels on the island are either equal to or below the levels that aircraft passengers are exposed to at 35k feet. Just don't eat the coconuts or crabs.
> As one learns by reading the linked article, radiation levels on the island are either equal to or below the levels that aircraft passengers are exposed to at 35k feet.
Time ?
Not really sure what you're asking. Time spent in an airplane passes at the same rate as time spent on an island. One hour on either is an equivalent dose.
The thriving wildlife sounds a lot like Chernobyl.
When humans disappear, nature thrives. The higher mutation and cancer rates don't really matter in aggregate.
I think that harmful effects of radiation in places like that matter mostly in the context of life expectancy and the well-being of individual organisms (that may be unlucky to e.g. ingest some particularly radiating matter and quickly die), but not the general growth of the population. Higher cancer rates may not matter much if the organisms that get cancer can reproduce before they die. Compared to other types of pollution and other human-related dangers to wildlife, some level of radiation isn't that harmful to nature.
The Dogs of Chernobyl (great video report):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmVGwOP_zi8
The grid of palm trees: https://www.google.com/maps/place/11%C2%B036'00.0%22N+165%C2...
There are more on the island Enyu south of that, with the old runway.
For a headline “what x looks like today”, I expected more pictures
> For a headline “what x looks like today”, I expected more pictures
They have great writers. /s
https://archive.is/oGLO7
I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more.
When it works right we have unlimited clean energy.
And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc.
This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem.
To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.
I only personally know one person who had been an active member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of their members opinion, they just have a much stricter view on what sustainable growth is (and that some degrowth might be needed to achieve sustainable growth in the long term).
The Sustainable Development Index had Cuba and Equador as the sole sustainable economies in years past.
There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.
> There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.
What if there is 200% tariffs on junk they shouldn't be buying anyhow? What if a new car becomes so expensive that the idea of having to replace it in 3-5/years induces outrage and class action lawsuits? What if you were only allowed to own one residence? What if out of season foods were fantastically expensive unless you had a community "garden"?
I know, HN, straight to -4. I'll meet you down there.
People would correctly identify that their standard of living is being reduced for ideological reasons without tangible individual benefits and would likely not respond well to that, resulting in a loss of political power for whatever movement instituted those policies and a reversal of said policies.
People went with the green bin initiative in the US, perhaps elsewhere. we switched to more fuel efficient cars in general when fuel became more expensive. New home construction and retrofits to make houses fully electric - no gas hobs, not gas furnace. these were all "QOL" adjustments that people have been making.
You have to pitch things the correct way, and it would really help if it wasn't treated as an "Ideological" thing but an ecological and humanitarian thing.
It is not okay to shove our pollution, poor wages and working conditions, and so on, to another country, nor its population. Arguing that it's okay if Chinese and vietnamese and indian folks are treated poorly, have poor health outcomes, and so on, just so long as we get shein and temu and amazon and walmart...
The "there's plenty for everyone, consume buy purchase, it's ok!" is just a lie. you can't do that without harming someone else.
If for some unimaginable reason the western world had embraced this philosophy wholeheartedly in 1985, literally billions of people would be struggling in grinding poverty (or worse!) instead of living significantly better lives than their parents or grandparents.
Is it different now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
i don't know, you tell me. And billions are in poverty now so i'm not sure this is a productive conversation. 44.9% of the global population is under $6.85 per day. 740mm try to survive on less than $2.15 a day.
45% of the earth's population is 3,700,000,000 or so, which, if my counting of commas is correct, is "literally billions of people"
> Three-quarters of all people in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa or in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
The people in extreme poverty are not the people you are making the argument for. Changing your consumption isn't going to do a thing for sub Saharan Africa and latin America, as a matter of fact increasing consumption of goods from those countries will improve their quality of life.
If you are ever in South Africa contact me, really. I'll take you to those people in povery, tell them yourself how you think Americans spending less money is going to change their lives in any way.
You will probably find some peoplewho are just trying their best to make it through the day. You will also find a lot of their lack of wealth comes from a lack of education.
You want to make a lasting difference, stop donating to feel good charities or animals or nonsense. Find an organisation that is focussed on improving education in these areas and donate to that.
Because nothing kills corrupt governments quite like an educated voting base.
"see, rampant consumerism is good for the people in sub-saharan africa! it's okay to buy disposable land-fill!"
another way to look at this is, we export our pollution to another country until their citizens get tired of the pollution, and thus charge more for production. So we pull up stakes and move on to the next country that's too poor to complain.
But i guess bootstrapping economies by dumping toxins everywhere on the planet is ok.
The goal should be to bootstrap sustainable, clean technologies, not the same 1800s era industrialization that coats the land in a fine sheen of toxic waste.
Most of those only really took off because the QOL sacrifice became close to negligible.
More importantly, a lot of it was hidden from view. Your washing machine and laundry detergent might be not as good as 30 years ago, but... do you know that for sure? And when did that happen? Maybe you're just imagining it.
Your old home had a gas furnace, and then you bought new construction and it's all-electric. Did the government do this? Are you even gonna think about it when making an offer? Your bill is gonna be higher, but how much of it is just because it's a different home?
And even then... you get away with it for a while, and then it all of sudden becomes a political talking point.
Case in point, at some point people realized what was going on with pickup trucks in the US.
> do you know that for sure?
Yes. I absolutely loathe modern washing machines. The irony is that they don't actually save any water because I end up running them multiple times. One of these days I will hopefully get around to gutting mine to replace the control box with an RPi. It's a lot of busy work for something that ought to function well to begin with.
> Your bill is gonna be higher,
Maybe not with a modern mini-split setup. Those are genuinely better than anything that came before them. As a bonus, they remove the failure mode of "blow up your house" that all gas appliances inherently carry.
You can also power them with solar, removing your day to day reliance on the grid.
> The irony is that they don't actually save any water because I end up running them multiple times.
i have an HE2 (which everyone, universally hates) and it cleans clothes fine with 1 load where you can't even see the top of the water most of the time. You have to load high efficiency top loading machines different than your grandparents loaded their speed queens. You must not put anything over the impeller. everything must go around the edges before the water starts. the impellers in HE washers don't agitate around the torus of the tub, they agitate like the electric field on a torus around the tub, so they go bottom, bottom middle, upper middle, upper, upper outer, bottom outer, bottom; in a loop. if you put stuff in the middle to start, it'll just swish that back and forth and never clean anything. Sometimes stuff won't even get wet, or you'll have dried soap stuck to your clothes.
secondly, don't use fabric softener. If you must use something because of your water quality, use vinegar.
If you need to wash sheets, curtains, blankets, comforters and the like, you can't put them around the outside, because the HE washers do that cycle differently, too. You have to gather the fabric like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindle sack, start with the sheet or whatever flat, fold all four corners (or whatever) into the middle so they all meet in the middle. Then pick it up by the four corners (or whatever) and place it in the washer with the middle of the sheet down and the four corners on top. Like a bindle sack. use the "sheets / heavy duty" cycle for sheets and the like. that's what it's for.
please, let me know if this solves your issues.
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Is this the "Climate Authoritarianism" tree in a 4X game
this is the big joke, i always score real high up on the 2-axis political tests; because i believe with good science, eschewing "oligarch" money, and getting corruption down real low, a proper government should be fairly draconian about things that affect everyone. So making it illegal to just drain oil from a car onto the street, that's authoritarian. Mandating that used oil must be returned to a "recycling facility", even if that facility just makes bunker oil and heating oil from it - that is also authoritarian.
Yes, there is a need to stop the small minority of humans that will not be good stewards of the planet, the people and creatures on it, and its atmosphere. I'm fine with being labelled an authoritarian.
oh and to answer a possible question about "what is 'good science'", i'd start with looking at scientists that have been doing science for at least a couple of decades, with no factual retractions on their record, or on the record of those they mentored (those who actually wrote the papers?). As an ancillary - their work must be reproducible, ideally by an competing institution - and it should go both ways. if Harvard always poo-poos UC Davis' research publications, then they shouldn't be surprised if the CSU and UC systems scrutinize Harvard's work especially.
to analogize to something i often hear, "We already have laws about that, just enforce them" - we already know what outstanding, excellent science looks like. Reinforce that.
on https://www.mapmypolitics.org/ i show as a lower left centrist, maybe 1 question away from "social Libertarian". I answered as though i were running the country, not as though i were living under the country i was describing. So questions where an answer is my ideal, but is impossible under the current system i answered that way. "Trade should be regulated to prevent unfair competition" was my answer, because "we pay our slaves - er... workers - 5 cents a day and don't care if they die" is unfair competition, to my reasoning. so is "we can provide cheap goods because we pollute the air, land and water, and ship cheap stuff to other countries they 'want' and pollute their air, land, and water, too." A couple examples, there.
You either convince them or the "security tax on walls, borders, etc." becomes a burden that ends it one way or another. One does not get a choice on the flavor of situationalphysics.
Growth? What growth?
Which Western nations have a fertility rate above replacement?
I think this is probably a misrepresentation of degrowth. Perhaps there are some that take an extreme view like that, but it is more that we are very very obviously beyond the limits of sustainable living and something will have to give, now, or worse in the future as we deplete even more resources.
Some of these differences won't be "degrowth" but changes, like shifting to high speed rail and buses over personal cars. Reducing meat in our diets. Giving nature some breathing room. In other words, a different way of living that might take some adjustment but would also be perfectly fine.
Furthermore, we need to consider developing societies. If we continue to consume finite natural resources unsustainably, we cut into the share that could be used to better the lives of the poorest societies on Earth.
I'm not involved in XR though. However, I think it's important to present a highly materialist viewpoint. It's not only about morality, but about ensuring as many people as possible can live decent lives in a renewed balance with nature.
Its funny how every economist would instantly recognise what needs to be done if we weren’t talking about the climate but a publicly traded company. Imagine the company is spending a whole lot more than it is making revenue; they still have a lot of cash reserves, but it’s clear the current business can’t just continue for much longer.
What do you do? Obviously, the first thing you do is make sure the expenses go down. Cut down the unnecessary, slim every operation to what is really required, stabilise the curve so the slope becomes less steep.
Only then can you start thinking of investments in increasing efficiency by means of technology or long shots.
All of this carries over to humanity; we need to achieve a sustainable curve.
> Hence the degrowth movement, etc.
The oddest thing about this to me is that they don't seem to think through what exactly this implies.
If one truly believes in the need to reduce human population then by far the highest margin things are not things like preserving a few hundred year old forest in England, but mass introduction of contraceptives to the DRC. It'll be places like Nigeria and Congo that dominate in terms of number of humans next century, not dying Europe (whose resource usage will decline even faster as fertility free falls), and those countries are not going to remain low resource consumption for too long.
Population growth decreases with education and higher standard of living, not only in Europe.
Yup, but those two countries alone are still going to hit 1.5 billion combined at current rates (DRC has 6.05 TFR declining at 0.05 per decade), momentum is key. And if they attain European rates of resource consumption then by that point they'll be by far the biggest "problem" as far as "degrowthers" are concerned.
And unlike, say, India, getting that number down is much easier (people resist being killed, but freely distributed contraceptives would likely by welcomed by women).
The introduction of mass contraceptives in DRC and its neighbors is happening. There's a lot of social and economic drivers that make it hard however.
Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to compete.
If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in.
And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inevitably cut corners to make as much of a profit for their shareholders, and accidents will happen. Also, there's proliferation risk. No, nuclear material from power plants isn't useable for nuclear bombs but it is for dirty bombs.
If we do it, it should be state managed like the military. We don't let commercial parties play around with nuclear bombs. Why should they be trusted with power plants that contain a hell of a lot more nuclear material?
Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. That should be the #1 goal, and the base load met by power storage. Only by nukes if there's no other way.
Anyway that's my opinion as an environmental type.
Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff.
Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond being merely detectable. There’s so much mercury in the oceans that it’s unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came from burning coal. An entire category of food poisoned planetwide!
"Detecting Fukishima" from North America was no mean feat .. it was akin to hearing the footfall of an ant several miles away.
The radiometric procedure here was (IIRC) replace a large number of air filter mats in a large number of HVAC units and after a week to cycle them back and then reduce the "contaminated" mats down to samples that sat within highly sensitive high crystal volume spectrometers for 72 hours or more.
The 'normal' environmental radiation event count level in 40 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation Crystals (if that's what was used) at some 80m above ground level is between one and two thousand events per second.
The Fukishima signature gamma events came to a few thousand in 72 hours (again, IIRC) whch had to be teased out from a flood of other events many magnitudes greater in count.
Absolutely not enough to be concerned about, but a seriously interesting bit of detection work.
And if nuclear became the default clean energy technology, it would have to be shared worldwide. Every country with the same issues, but varying levels of competence, political alignment, terror risks etc. do we want 100 000 nuclear power stations?
(Edit: although maybe thorium might shift the calculation.)
Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase damage/kWh.
> its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic
Ostrich Worship -- using detection limits as a proxy for harm -- implicitly promotes damage that is difficult to quantify over damage that is easy to detect in the most minute quantities. It elevates burying your head in the sand into a principle. The fact that nuclear pollution can be detected in mind-bendingly minute quantities is a very dumb reason to be anti-nuclear.
> one incident can cause so much of it
Headline Bias is usually something people aim to avoid rather than celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of slip-and-fall accidents from contractors running around rooftops can't reasonably be rounded to 0 on account of being individually "boring," yet that's what you do when you focus on the biggest incident. Speaking of which, do you oppose hydro-power on the basis of the Banqiao Dam disaster?
> Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
Single Ended Comparisons are the root of all evil. PV cells and windmills don't pop into existence without side effects. Their big problem is that you need a lot of them to generate electricity, leading to a lot of side effects.
> I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is.
It's not. Or it wasn't. I'm extremely relieved that after 50 years we finally found a low-CO2 power solution that self-styled greens don't fight tooth and nail, and on that count solar and wind are unbeatable. But we had the solution. We could have been done phasing out CO2-emitting sources if we had just kept up the pace on nuclear rollout. Instead, we have just begun. The 50 gigatons excess CO2 emissions (so far, USA only) in order to wait for solar and wind to become economical were an absolute travesty.
What is this baaed on, vibes? I don't see an official position on nuclear power from XR. All I can find is discussions like this where people discuss a diversity of views about nuclear power.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ExtinctionRebellion/comments/bhah12...
Extinction rebellion is focused on forcing politicians to take climate change seriously and make urgent policy changes. If politicians want to meet them with "we are taking this seriously, we're making a massive investment into nuclear power" they're free to do so.
> a 50,000 year nature preserve
that begins with none of the existing lifeforms that were there beforehand.
The comment spoke about nuclear power accidents; neither Three mile island, Fukishima, nor Chernobyl wiped out all (or even a significant number) of existing lifeforms.
Bikini Atoll was blasted with 23 (or 24, there's an edge case) separate nuclear explosions in the air, at sea level, and underwater, one a thousand times more powerful than either of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons.
Not comparable to a nuclear power station accident.
people have seemed to forget that there were some people in LA that use to walk outside in gas masks due to all the air pollution.
Because their stated purpose and their real intents are not aligned.
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Surprisingly few pictures given the title of the article..
“The method has been used for everything from measuring the age of ringless trees in the Amazon to examining whether humans generate new olfactory bulb neurons into adulthood”
…do we?
Qualified 'Yes'.
We do but the extent is limited compared to other mammals, brain mass normalised.
There's a historical overview here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55966/
I'd have to dig around for comparative mammal brain regen rates.
Imagine you lived literally in paradise on the most beautiful Pacific atoll - an utterly gorgeous place of peace and serenity and happiness.
Literally heaven, surrounded by the most beautiful ocean, reefs and fish.
Imagine then they turn up, round you up, take you off your island and send you somewhere else to live forever, taking your home from you.
Then they nuke that island repeatedly so it can never be lived on again and is now one the of the most polluted and radioactive and toxic places on earth.
Pristine perfect beauty converted to unliveable toxic hell for humans and animals.
I'm not excusing or justifying any actions here, but thinking from a 1946 perspective: the second world war had just ended and we all know about the horrible losses that happened there, both military and civilian. This new hugely destructive weapon has just been developed. The Soviet Union is also developing the weapon, with an unhinged paranoid madman as its absolute leader. Everyone can see the outline of an arms race developing (with the second world war very fresh in memory).
In that context, relocating 167 people to another island within the same country/cultural region barely registers.
Again, I'm not justifying anything, but if I had been around at the time, I'm not sure I would have cared either.
> an utterly gorgeous place of peace and serenity and happiness.
Pretty sure the people there had just as much conflict, poverty, and misery as the rest of us.
And were always one cyclone (hurricane) away from extinction.
One's paradise is another one's nightmare
The place looks nice but there is not much there to make human life easy or nice: not much soil for agriculture or herds, not much shade, no fresh water, no resources to build anything, ...
> Imagine then they turn up, round you up, take you off your island and send you somewhere else to live forever, taking your home from you.
This is the story of mankind, even today people want forcibly remove people.
Phrasing it that way makes me think of how the Scots were driven off their land to work in factories.
The Scots were driven off their land by other Scots, though. In addition, comparing subsistence agriculture in a land where you can freeze to death with the absolute abundance of food provided by a tropical island seems a stretch. Having spent considerable time in both the Scottish Highlands -- where my wider family is centered -- and having lived on a tropical island for a few years, it takes a particularly romantic eye to try and make this comparison.
> the absolute abundance of food provided by a tropical island
There is no absolute abundance of food on an atoll. There’s fish, coconuts and precious little ground for anything else to grow. It can be sustainable if the populations are very small, and then turn to hell quickly if they are not.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
there's plenty of paradise like islands in the pacific. you could move all the canadians to siberia's tundra and they'd probably do well.
devil's advocate: GODZILLA and all the excitement and joy the franchise gave people would not be as much a thing without the US trying to blow bikini atoll off aerial maps.
You are a wicked and despicable human being.
What, did Medium just copy over Stanford's alumni magazine? Here's the original story.[1]
[1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-lik...
Medium is a publishing/hosting platform for authors. This Medium account is (or purports to be) the official account of the Stanford alumni magazine.
It appears that it was published on medium and subsequently added to the standfordmag site, hence the 2 links to it they're and the notice that new articles are published there. It probably just remains because they have no control over medium, so they can't turn the page into a permanent redirect, and they don't want to just take it down and break links.
I do wonder why people still publish on Medium. There was a time when Medium probably (for no particular reason carried credibility (for no partucularly good reason over a random blog post. But these days the negatives seem like they outweigh any small positives.
It's still the least bad way to just write something and put it on the internet in a way that looks non-awful. For people whose focus is the content, not the, uh, medium, it still makes sense.
I guess I won't really argue. The appearance is good and, if you don't want your own blog (which is still more work to setup than it should be unless you're a web designer or pay someone), I suppose Medium is a reasonable option.
If I may go off-topic, I wonder why the “Standford” spelling is such a common typo? Is there a linguistic reason for it, or is it some sort of infectious meme?
It's possible it's QWERTY-related as a sibling suggests, but there's also precedent for this specific kind of sound change in many dialects of English: /d/ is a stop consonant, which are commonly inserted in the middle of a nasal (/n/) and fricative (/f/), and in particular /d/ is produced with the tip of the tongue the same way that /n/ is, so it and /t/ (the unvoiced variant) are the most likely stop consonants to be inserted after /n/.
Other examples of this effect:
Samson -> Sampson
prince -> prints
hamster -> hampster
warmth -> warmpth
fence -> fents
Python -> Pythong
I mean typing it slowly, left ring finger 's', left pointer finger 't', left pinky 'a', right pointer 'n', then because 'f' and 'd' are so close on a qwerty keyboard any sloppiness between the left pointer and middle finger sitting on the 'd', 'f' would mean the d gets hit first as you roll into the 'f', seems pretty easy to make
You must have missed it. All this is mentioned at the very top of the linked page. The article was published in this Medium and then they moved to stanfordmag.org.
> We’ve moved! Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on Stanfordmag.org.
1. This is the official Medium publication for the Stanford Alumni Magazine.
2. The Medium version of this story was published 1 month before the stanfordmag.org version, so this is the "original" story.
Arguably the print edition of Stanford's alumni magazine is the "original" version. The web version of that issue is currently hosted at:
https://stanfordmag.org/issues/december-2017
It makes sense to link to the current web version of the issue rather than the medium.com version.
Right under the title there's a note that says "We've moved! Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on Stanfordmag.org."
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