View Single Post
Old 2011-04-02, 15:25   Link #2078
Vexx
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
*Author
 
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
Quote:
Originally Posted by bayoab View Post
This isn't misreporting or sensationalism. They've spent the entire previous page establishing what the context of "flow" is. If anything, it's an editing mistake.
however, "high levels of radiation" has no context.... it would have been more useful to use terms people understand (and a lot less sensational). How many dental x-rays exposure, for example.
(googling was no help... all it showed was that literally dozens of reporters had copied from each other across the planet ... right down to the sentences in some cases. No one bothered to find out what the "legal limit" was in the first place).
Quote:
Originally Posted by randomly selected article, they were almost all nearly identical
the level of radioactive iodine which was detected in the sea had reached 4385 times higher than legal limit.
Scary, eh? Except that the number really doesn't tell the average reader much.

Fortunately. the half life of radioactive iodine is only 8.02 days.... almost no report mentions that either.

Here's an EPA note about the levels detected in Washington state:
Quote:
Results from a screening sample taken March 25 from Spokane, Wash. detected 0.8 pCi/L of iodine-131, which is more than 5,000 times lower than the Derived Intervention Level set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
See? In this EPA announcement the actual physical reading was provided. (note: pCi/L = Picocuries Per Liter.... "pico" means 10**-12 or 0.000000000001, but keep in mind a Curie is a damn big wad of radiation)

That's what had the XKCD guy annoyed enough to produce that chart I keep quoting -- lack of context contributes to *irrational* fear rather than *informed rational* wariness.
---------------------------------------
In actual regular news about the immediate problems people are facing in Japan, or in analysis of the tsunami:
Seawall gave false sense of security to one town...
__________________

Last edited by Vexx; 2011-04-02 at 15:54.
Vexx is offline   Reply With Quote