I was curious and looked up adult women literacy rates for women in Iraq and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category. For female youths aged 15-24 it rose from 80% to 91% over the same time period (though in the intervening period that did indeed drop to 72-73% in their stats during the chaos of the Iraq War).
So long as you don’t wind up with a piece of the alpha-emitter inside you (ex. by eating it, breathing it, introduction via a wound) they are radiologically harmless. Alpha particles are highly charged and comparatively heavy since they have two protons and two neutrons. That mass and charge means that they make a lot of collisions and dump a ton of energy along a short track… VERY short, like the diameter of an individual cell even. Devastating if they are doing that in living tissue due to massive energy deposition all concentrated in a particular area, but on the outside the layers of your skin will adequately protect you. Or, as memes of old have put it:
They are of more concern as like an airborne gas or dusty contamination since you may not be aware if you are breathing them in or accidentally eating traces after touching a innocuous looking dusty surface and not washing your hands before lunch.
A little thought exercise they tell you when you study radiation: if you were to hypothetically have four equivalent activity sources that emitted alpha, beta, gamma and neutron radiation, and you have only four methods of either putting one in your pocket, throwing it in the trash, eating it, or holding it in your hand, which emitter do you match to which method?
Alpha is fine to hold in your hand since your skin will block the alpha particles; you want to avoid eating it because that would really mess you up. Beta has a bit more penetration so you don’t want to have it in your hand but the pocket is relatively fine. Neutron radiation is very penetrating except for moderators similar in mass to neutrons like the hydrogen atoms in water which the neutrons collide with and dump a ton of energy on; unfortunately you are made up of a lot of excellent moderating material where those neutrons would dump a lot of energy in you so you don’t want those anywhere near you and it’s best to throw that source away. Gammas are also highly penetrating so they don’t care that much about small differences like being in your hand or pocket but through having basically no mass and no charge they aren’t particularly likely to interact with you either so all else being equal they’re the safest of the emitters to have inside you if that’s a forced option.
It’s common for a lot of authoritarian places to have laws that are selectively enforced. Since the enforcement is rare many people don’t bother following them but if someone bothers someone high up for any reason then breaking the law (that tons of other people break all the time anyway) is an easy excuse for the authorities to come down like a sack of bricks with a pretext ready. Being higher profile makes it more likely that you catch the eye of someone who hates you so it can be safer being some random person too low to notice instead. Though higher profile people also have more people ready to defend them generally so if you do get on someone’s list it’s better to have people in your corner who will make noise and maybe get punishment lessened or called off.
I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:
In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.
Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.
“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.
It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.
“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”
The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.
Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.
There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.
This article inspired me to check and Teddy Boy Greg (the disgruntled white power barber with a ton of ridiculous facial tattoos who moved to Russia to get away from what he called “degenerates”) has recently died in Ukraine
When I was a kid I thought “talkie” was such a ridiculous, funny-sounding word for the advent of films with sound. It was only years later that I realized that the word “movie” which I had never thought twice about was almost the exact same thought process for, you know, pictures that moved.
Idk why people do this. Leaving aside Ukraine there’s also Russia to worry about.
Ex. American tankie Russell Bentley moved over to join the war in eastern Ukraine on Russia’s side, but Ukraine wasn’t what got him. As an “information warrior”, he was taking a video of the aftermath of a Ukrainian strike to make some propaganda about it. His own guys saw this suspicious character filming the site and declared him to be a spy helping with Ukrainian spotting despite his protests to the contrary that he was a ‘journalist’.
Dude was sexually abused, tortured to death by his own side (this particular group has been filmed hooking up field telephones to electrocute the genitals in its torture methods) and his body was blown up in a car with a TNT charge in an attempt to get rid of the evidence after realizing he was on their side after the fact.
A couple of days ago the UK seized a shadow fleet tanker so I would assume that’s the reason for Russia to launch this provocation.
Don’t think this will rattle the UK at all when they could very easily delete this ship, but maybe it’s more of a warning to smaller countries without as robust of a navy to try to dissuade them from doing anything against the shadow fleet?
Edit: BBC says that it’s thought unrelated to the seizing. Says that the Russians were doing this shooting and sounding an alarm to tell the yacht to get out of its way while it was drifting towards them in foggy conditions. Also says that this was not in the UK’s territorial waters although it was near them and give a marker on the map.
They are having diesel shortages and super high prices since the refineries keep getting blown up while simultaneously a lot of the middle east ones are out of commission. So not necessarily a ton for America to vacuum up and feel substantial relief but it does give fat stacks of cash to boost refinery repair efforts by pumping up demand and prices for Russian diesel
They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.
Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over
U-238 (the most common isotope in natural uranium, present to an even higher degree in depeleted uranium which has had the shorter-lived U-235 removed) has a half life in the billions of years and with such a long half-life life even with a large mass of the material you won’t be getting many radiological decays occurring. Which is not to say it’s good for you to ingest or contact, it’s definitely not, but that’s more due to the chemical properties it has as a heavy metal (think like how lead is bad for you) than its radiological ones.
Fission products formed in a nuclear reactor on the other hand have half lives all over the place from tiny fractions of a second to days, years, millions of years and so on. So you can get a high dose from short-lived isotopes going through many decays if you happen to be around them while they’re freshly generated, and intermediate life isotopes can persist in the environment for sustained periods while still dosing up the area. So a flying nuclear reactor venting its exhaust over you is quite a lot worse radiologically speaking than some depleted uranium being in your environment, though that said the chemical properties of having uranium in your drinking water or the physical properties of a high density round shot at you are plenty bad regardless of the radiological harm being often overstated.
I don’t get why people on Lemmy care so much about either of them so passionately, I passively see more Linux vs Windows in a week here than basically the rest of my life before joining this site. Is every other person here some kind of computer science enthusiast or something like that?
