DeaneBarker.net

Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?: Here’s a fascinating mystery about a shipping container found at a port in Italy last year that was emitting massive amounts of radiation.

[He] turned the device back on. It started wailing again. Montagna was being bathed in radiation.

As he stood in the morning sun listening to that sound, Montagna realized that one of the containers in front of him held a lethal secret. But was that secret merely a slow-motion radioactive industrial accident — or a bomb, one that could decimate the Italian city’s entire 15-mile waterfront? Montagna ran back to his car to get a less sensitive detector. He didn’t give much thought to protection; at those radiation levels, he would have needed lead armor 5 inches thick to stand within a couple of feet of the source for very long.

Montagna took the new meter and walked up to the sealed boxes, circling each one in turn. Halfway down the second row, a crimson 20-footer with “TGHU 307703 0 22G1″ emblazoned in white on its side jerked the dials. As he passed a few feet from the box’s left side, Montagna was absorbing radiation equivalent to six chest x-rays per minute.

No one knew why, and no one knew what to do.  The container sat on the dock for over a year, quarantined off the side somewhere, while people discussed how to handle it.  The ending is just as mysterious (though on the comments presented a pretty compelling theory of what might have happened).

A hard road for the poor in need of cars: These numbers are interesting, but I’d like to see this idea subjected to a larger survey.

A nationwide survey of 353 people who bought cars with help from a nonprofit group called Ways to Work found that 72% reported an increase in income. Of those who were on public assistance when they acquired a car, 87% were no longer receiving it a few years later.

Other studies have found that low-income people were more involved in community activities and had better access to healthcare after getting cars, while their children participated more frequently in after-school programs.

For the record, I don’t think the government should be involved in buying people cars, but I think there’s a place for private charities to step up there.  I wonder how many private organizations take this path – simply finding reliable transportation – to help people out of poverty.

This other bit was interesting:

If anything, the government has hindered the working poor’s access to cars. The 2009 Cash-for-Clunkers program, for example, put 690,000 running vehicles in the junkyard, making the used cars that remained more expensive.

"Those cars could have been used for very needy working-class families," said Carolyn Hayden, a Glendarden, Md., transportation consultant. "It will go down in the annals as a missed opportunity."

Of course, that program was camouflaged as having some environmental benefit, which, as I’ve said before, was hogwash.

Kyoto will not be buried in Durban: lawmaker: Back in 1997, people gave the U.S. a hard time for not committing to the Kyoto Protocol.  However, in the end, the U.S. was one of the only honest nations at the table.

The first commitment period of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol ends next year. The pact was intended to limit the adverse effects of climate change but only obliged developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The United States, one of the biggest emitters in the world, never signed the deal and developing countries like China have since become major emitters.

I hope everyone else is just as honest this time around.  Signs point to yes.

Russia, Canada and Japan have said they will not sign up for another Kyoto commitment period when the current one expires in 2012.

For the record, it would have been great if the U.S. did sign and everyone held up their agreements.  But I think it was obvious at the time that no one was going to do what they said they were going to, so Kyoto wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

Reformed skinhead endures agony to remove tattoos: Here’s the story of an ex-skinhead with extensive facial tattoos who left the racist movement.  Desperate to have his tattoos removed, he begged for help from the South Poverty Law Center, and they went looking for a donor.

So when Roy called a couple of months later saying a donor was willing to pay for the surgery, Widner could hardly believe it. The donor, a longtime supporter of the SPLC had been moved by Widner’s story — and shocked by photographs of his face.

"For him to have any chance in life and do good," she said, "I knew those tattoos had to come off."

She agreed to fund the surgeries — at a cost of approximately $35,000 — on several conditions. She wanted to remain anonymous. She wanted assurances that Bryon would get his GED, would go into counseling and would pursue either a college education or a trade.

Click through to see the pictures.

Considering When It Might Be Best Not to Know About Cancer: I never would have thought that early cancer detection could have any risk, but this article claims otherwise.

Two recent clinical trials of prostate cancer screening cast doubt on whether many lives — or any — are saved. And it said that screening often leads to what can be disabling treatments for men whose cancer otherwise would never have harmed them.

A new analysis of mammography concluded that while mammograms find cancer in 138,000 women each year, as many as 120,000 to 134,000 of those women either have cancers that are already lethal or have cancers that grow so slowly they do not need to be treated.

Turn that last statistic around a bit – only 3% to 16% of women who had cancer detected in a mammogram derived any benefit from that detection.  In the remaining 84% to 97%, the cancer was either harmless or was already unstoppably lethal.

Traders talk back to Occupy Chicago: This is a flier that some people have been handing out at some of the Occupy Wall Street protests.  It’s brutal, but I also think it’s very true in some respects.  Worth reading, at any rate, for the other side of the story.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

Be sure to click through and read the whole thing.  I don’t necessarily agree with it 100%, but it’s just proof that there are two sides to every story.  Not everything in this country is black-or-white.  There are shades of gray, and the financial crisis just may be one of the grayest.

The "Last Place Aversion" Paradox: Fascinating concept – “last place aversion” causes some people to oppose policies that favor income redistribution, even when it would benefit them personally.

Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest. Our work suggests that people exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place – what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.

Essentially, they think there’s someone behind them, and they want to keep that person behind them.  So long as they feel they’re one step up on someone, they want to maintain that advantage.

[…] we asked Americans whether they supported an increase to the minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour. Those making $7.25 or below were very likely to support the increase – after all, they would be immediate beneficiaries. In addition, people making substantially more than $7.25 were also fairly positive towards the increase. Which group was the most opposed? Those making just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25. We might expect people who make just below and just above $7.25 to have similar lifestyles and policy attitudes – but in this case, while those making below $7.25 would benefit if the minimum wage were raised to, say, $8.25, those making just above $7.25 would run the risk of falling into a tie for last place.

Humans will always be competitive, it turns out.

The Race to Grow the One-Ton Pumpkin: Growers are racing to achieve a one-ton pumpkin.  The current recordholder weighed in at over 1,800 pounds.  This is an interesting article, but this sentence stood out for me in particular:

In fact, growers typically feed their pumpkins a compost “brew” so rich — the water is mixed with worm castings, molasses and liquid kelp — that the fruits can gain as much as 50 pounds a day.

Fifty pounds a day!?  That’s some crazy compost.  And the rub is, you can’t even eat them:

When the season ends, growers like Mr. Young often tow their creations to a fairground or botanical garden for display; with walls a foot thick and low sugar content, the pumpkins are not fit for pie

I Am the Population Problem: Here’s some really, really sobering information: by having first world kids, you are screwing the planet.

When a poor woman in Uganda has another child—too often because she lacks access to family-planning services, economic opportunity, or self-determination—she might dampen her family’s prospects for climbing out of poverty or add to her community’s challenges in providing everyone with clean water and safe food, but she certainly isn’t placing a big burden on the global environment.

When someone like me has a child—watch out, world! Gear, gadgets, gewgaws, bigger house, bigger car, oil from the Mideast, coal from Colombia, Coltan from the Congo, rare earths from China, pesticide-laden cotton from Egypt, genetically modified soy from Brazil. And then when that child has children, wash, rinse, and repeat it all (in hot water, of course). Without even trying, we Americans slurp up resources from every corner of the globe and then spit 99 percent of them back out again as pollution.

What does this all mean (emphasis mine)?

[…] in America the climate impact of having one fewer child is almost 20 times greater than the impact of adopting a series of eco-friendly practices for your entire lifetime, such as driving a hybrid, recycling, using efficient appliances and installing compact fluorescent lights.

This goes back to my admittedly cynical view that there is no way to stop climate change the inevitable degradation of the planet, and so we should put all our energies into preparing for the changes instead.

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?: Long, but great, article on how DeBeers has spent decades manipulating the diamond market and turning it into one of the great scams in history.

The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds.

Anil Dash did a great piece on this some years back: Diamonds are For Never.

I’m hoping that we see a stigmatization of diamonds, and a decrease in popularity and sales similar to the one suffered by the fur trade when the brutality of their industry was revealed. But if the moral issues aren’t compelling enough, perhaps their contempt for your emotional maturity, your partner’s character, and the solidity of your relationship would be enough to dissuade you.