https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/pull/878

Thanks

Alpha particles: literally just Helium minus the electrons. Only harmful because it moves fast at first. Even then, it’s only really harmful if it gets emitted inside your body. It barely penetrates skin.

Beta: electrons and positron. Electrons will chemically react with something very quickly (except in a vacuum, they don’t stick around as free electrons). Positrons will find a nearby electron and be annihilated.

Gamma: very high frequency light. Can be quite dangerous, but doesn’t persist.

None of these transmute other things into radioactive isotopes. The kind of radiation that makes other things radioactive is neutrons, but those are very unusual outside of a nuclear reactor. Fission and some fusion reactions make neutrons, and a couple of radioactive elements make small amounts, and that’s about it. Neutrons also don’t persist in the environment (and, interestingly, they don’t persist very long in space either).

So a spill of hot radioactive sodium is nasty. It’s hot, and it’s highly reactive. But it’s so reactive that it will all react! Sodium can’t meaningfully contaminate groundwater, because it will just turn into salts. It can mess up soil pH, because the reaction product is lye, but that can be remedied by an acid. (Other than its pH, lye is pretty harmless. You use flush it down your drain to clean your drain, and you can even use it to make pretzels!) The radioactive sodium-23 emits radioactive sodium, but much less than 1 trillionth will remain after a day — what’s left is non-radioactive magnesium, which is harmless.

So I wouldn’t want it be around a sodium leak, but visiting it a day or two later while wearing a good pair of boots (for protection against any remaining lye) seems quite safe.

If you were to be contaminated by ingesting some radioactive sodium, it would still decay and be gone within days.

The normal way of dealing with cases of taking in radioactive abd bio-active elements, like iodine, sodium, (and even strontium which tends to take place if calcium), is taking excessive amounts of the same element, but a normal, stable isotope. Taking in some excessive table salt (cheese and chips anyone?) should be pretty easy.

You’ll never have the environment we have here (even in its currently declining state).

Do you think society will be better on Mars living in indentured servitude for generations?

As Lennon said, “war is over, if you want it”. It’s the same with the problems we have down here.

- Food production with low resources consumption.

- Distributed, low-scale production with high efficiency. So no need for high consumes to keep high production efficiency.

- Implementing renewable energy and the concepts listed above from the ground up in every aspect of life. That's scarcity, harsh environments and need for you together with bright minds.

- And many many things that we can't even imagine from here.

> “war is over, if you want it”

The problem is the "if you want it". That's for most of the unsolved problem we have on earth.

If you keep failing generation after generation maybe you need to change your point of view to understand how small we are and as we are not much different each other and from other living things.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

It's a step on the way to going even further, beyond our solar system.

How do you propose to travel for over 20 years?

It's clear then that robots will be exploring the solar system, not us. Even then it's going to take several centuries just to travel to, collect data from, and send back to earth just from the local stars we can see with the unaided eye.

When they say space is big, space is BIG.

Sorry, that simply isn't true. Multi-generation starships don't violate any laws of physics.

> How do you propose to travel for over 20 years?

By recognizing that you aren't coming back, and that even if you don't make it there, your children will.

I mean, we have examples of this even here on Earth. Moses and the Israelites supposedly wandered for 40 years. The pioneers who set out on the Oregon Trail largely knew it was a one-way trip. Other examples abound..

That's true - but they do violate what we know about psychology. You're signing on your progeny to be imprisoned on a ship from birth to death, when you yourself never had to endure that. Think about the sentiment behind the "Okay, Boomer..." memes and magnify that generational hatred several-fold. Someone is going to sabotage the ship and its crew long before they ever reach their destination. That's just how people work. Remember, we're not rational.

Plenty of people have lived out their lives while rarely or never leaving their small town.

In fact, that was the default for most of human history.

How is that going to work for your population confined to a ship the size of a small town? It isn't. It's science fiction.

Future generations may grow up in a world of much more limited travel, existing in small areas of '15-minute cities' without cars, minimal access to air travel, living in tiny apartments, and most likely spending most of their time in some sort of metaverse, with very limited food choices. We'll have stopped burning fossil fuels and given most of the planet back to nature, and can't allow the working-class masses the transport/freedoms to access/enjoy/ruin it again.

If that's what the world comes to, it'll be a lot closer to life on a generation ship than the world we're used to today.

Not that any of this solves the problem of humanity having nowhere to go. The trip is ultimately futile since the stars you're going to are also dying.

Some did. Most stayed in their little town for their entire lives.

> How is that going to work for your population confined to a ship the size of a small town?

The same way it worked for small towns before mass transportation was available.

We're not going within my lifetime, but we don't know what currently-unimaginable technologies could be developed in the future (if we don't destroy our civilization within the next few decades)

Significantly extending the lifespan of humans seems inevitable at some point. Robotics and AI will continue to improve. We may master fusion, or discover new ways to store energy. We'll probably mine asteroids and master construction in space.

Robots will lead the way, but humans are unlikely to lose the urge to explore.

The most important point to realize about science fiction is that it is fiction.

We should tell it to physicists ;-)

That was the same in 1700s. Laws of mechanics were well known and they were convinced that it was just about getting better in using math with it.

Then electricity and magnetism emerged.

Then nuclear physics and quantum theories and relativity.

And we know very well that they don't match up.

And we have anomalies all over in our measurements and no good theory to explain them.

But just using "known" physics theories we have warp drives and warmholes and quantum teleportation.

Going to the moon was something impossible and we accomplished it.

Before the same was for flying or going deep underwater.

Do you need more examples to get some fate?

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dbalmer/eportfolio/Nature%20of%20...

Our knowledge is incomplete, but we can put boundary boxes around what is possible. Just because our theories are incomplete doesn't mean that what we know is wrong. Our knowledge has been extensively tested over the past 100 years.

Based on our incomplete knowledge. So we really can't. What would a proof that something is physically impossible look like?

Newton was wrong, Einstein has provided us a better, more accurate, theory of gravity. Guess what? We still teach Newton in high school and college physics! Why? Because though it's wrong it's only wrong in the most extreme circumstances. Generally speaking it works quite well. The only observation we made contradicting Newton was Mercury's perihelion precession. But Einstein didn't change how fast apples fall to the ground.

Likewise, we know, or at least strongly suspect, Einstein is wrong. That doesn't mean everything we've observed the past 100 years corroborating General Relativity goes out the window with a new theory. No, instead that's what makes creating a new theory hard: you have to account for a century's worth of observations validating GR and reconcile with QFT (otherwise why bother).

But it wouldn't change anything about what we already know and what we've observed. That's why it's a boundary box. This is science, not magic.

Notably, the idea that a new theory simply takes existing "observations" and adds to them is historically unfounded. Indeed, many theories start as thought experiments that contradict observation and later turn out to be better models, not the other way around.

You also may or may not be familiar with the concepts of theory-ladenness and the commensurability of theories. If not, I suggest doing some reading about that so you can appreciate why those questions aren't as straightforward as you seem to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commensurability_(philosophy_o...

This is important in this discussion because we've never observed anything traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. That would appear to rule-out faster-than-light travel, which for practical reasons would make traveling to other solar systems impossible.

Or if we can't do that (which would be weird since many complex mammals can hibernate already) then generation ships are possible. It'll probably be only done by culturally crazy groups, but hey! They're still counted as humans, and their expanding human habitats into new systems is still a win to us all.

Although that's a more recent work, coming out in 1985.

May I ask, where are you from?

Not the OP, but I'm curious (sorry). What does provenance have to do with finding Banks accessible?

For the record, I'm Greek and I read most of my Sci-Fi in Greek translations. Banks was one of the first writers whose work I read entirely in the original English (the other two were Terry Pratchett and Jeff Noon, both of which I started reading around the same time as Banks). I don't remember ever feeling that his writing was inaccessible, not even Feersum Engine, discussed in the sibling comments, and which was his first I ever read. At the time my English was not too good, so, like I say, I'm curious, why do you ask the OP where they're from? Is it because of the Scottish thing you mention below?

Reading your other comments here you say you met him many times. I'm envious! Me and my friend who have both read all his books (and all the M-less books also) managed to mix up the dates and miss his visit to the town we lived at the time. That was a couple of years before he died. I hate being a fan girl but I've always felt a certain regret for never having met the guy. Or Pratchett. I'm the worlds' worst fan :)

No problem!

> What does provenance have to do with finding Banks accessible?

Well, for instance, my first fiancée was Norwegian, and she really struggled with both Feersum Endjinn and the Bridge. She spoke superb English, better than native level (I am among other things a qualified TEFL/TESOL teacher, and I'd assess her as better than C2 level) -- but she could not handle phonetic English that was not in RP. (Received Pronunciation, that is, "standard" British English, or BBC English.)

Banksie was Scottish and sounded Scottish. (She met him with me, I think. I don't recall if she had problems with his spoken English.) To read the phonetic parts in IMB/IB, you need to read them in a Scottish accent -- the phonetics don't work with RP English.

(Not a clue how they work with American English, which like most Brits I understand fine but cannot speak.)

Another comparison: a few years ago in Brno in the Czech Republic I went to see Trainspotting 2 with a bunch of people: Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, German... and one other Brit, a friend of mine. It was shown in an art-house cinema, not subtitled. I told them they were brave. "Why?" they asked. "It's in English, isn't it?"

"Well, not really..." I replied. "It's in Scottish. It's not the same."

Later they told me that they barely understood a word.

The only people in that showing who did were me and the other Brit.

I am learning Czech. After 8 years, I am approaching B1 level. (Getting to A1 German took me 3 days, for comparison. A1 Czech took about 2-3 YEARS.) The more Czech I learn, to my dismay, the less Slovak I understand.

Scottish is to English as Slovak is to Czech: they are similar, quite close, but not the same. Knowing one as a foreign language may not help you to understand the other. Written English is standardized on the RP British English dialect. When Bankie wrote phonetically, he is recording a different dialect.

So, in my personal experience, a non-native speaker trying to read IB or IMB's books might struggle a lot more than they might do if they were, say, listening to an audio book of the same material.

> I've always felt a certain regret for never having met the guy.

I am very happy I got to spend a little time with him. He is one of my all-time favourite writers, and it was a privilege.

I have in fact got to meet quite a lot of my favourite writers... since you said:

> Or Pratchett.

Yes, Pterry too. I also have his first-ever novel in hardback first edition, as I was a fan of his before he wrote the Discworld books, and met him many times. About half my Pratchetts are signed.

And Douglas Adams, just the once.

>> And Douglas Adams, just the once.

Oh gosh, now I'm even more jealous :)

>> Banksie was Scottish and sounded Scottish. (She met him with me, I think. I don't recall if she had problems with his spoken English.) To read the phonetic parts in IMB/IB, you need to read them in a Scottish accent -- the phonetics don't work with RP English.

Well that's interesting. I read Feersum Engine back in 2004 I think, a year before I moved to the UK. Once arrived, it was a couple of years before I could make myself undestood by, or understand myself, any person of the British persuasion. I distinctly remember an hour-long conversation with a man from Glasgow, in which I did not understand a single word. For all I know, I nodded along and smiled politely to him claiming that the Holocaust was all made up and Hitler was right to exterminate the Jews anyway.

I know Glaswegian accents are hard. I think I get about 60% of Burnistoun. It never occurred to me that Feersum Engine must be read in a Scottish voice. I wouldn't be able to pull it off anyway. But it just really clicked for me and I didn't find it a drag, in fact the parts of Ergates the ant where the ones I liked reading the most. You know, because they were the most fun!

I certainly don't have an RP. After 17 years in the UK I have a soft, but firm, South European accent. I once watched a recording of myself giving a presentation and my accent is very, very there. It could maybe sound like a very poor attempt at imitating a Scottish accent, by someone who had only heard a very vague description of it. Maybe. Dunno.

>> "Well, not really..." I replied. "It's in Scottish. It's not the same."

More weird. I've watched Trainspotting a few times, with subtitles on or off, can't remember. I can always understand it just fine. Spud is the only one I have trouble understanding and I think that's partly on purpose.

Maybe has something to do with being Greek, at a very wild guess? Scottish people speaking English sound to me like they're making the sweetest sounds that remind me of home. We have strong "ARRRs" (like in "Rory") and "CHAAAs" (like in "loch") too.

Thank you for being kind to my curiosity!

Yes, what your L1 language is does affect these things, and ability with accents varies a lot, even among natives.

I found there were too many new concepts just thrown about with little or no exposition. Where some authors would go on and on, I found Banks to be too light on the background. I realise the books would have likely been much longer had every piece of tech or new planet had been elaborated, and for the most part much of it was minor detail, but it disconnected me from his stories.

(Edit: fixed typo)

There's probably some general point in here about how one thing can't please everyone.

I recently set aside book 2 of N K Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. I may come back to it, but while it is very original, it is at heart a post-apocalyptic fantasy series, and I am just not very into fantasy.

Yes this is a multi-award-winning series that's been praised to the skies.

Similarly several friends were recently delighted to get commemorative editions of John Crowley's Little, Big -- for me, one of the single least enjoyable, most irritating books I've ever forced myself to finish.

I didn’t enjoy the frequent switch between first, second and third person and I honestly didn’t think it was that interesting of a story, but for some reason people seem to rave about it. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

The only thing is, it makes me treat reviews and recommendations with great caution. I have some friends who like most of the books I like, but they also like some utter dross, and don't like things I consider wonderful. So one is left to one's own devices.

Also there is a lot of descriptions of hyper-advanced weaponry, drones, etc - even though I enjoy the books, it can be a bit much sometimes.

Of course, most are more readable in the original Marain :)

True up to a point. Not limited to Iain M Banks, though: the Bridge does much the same.

The key thing to know is that Banks was a Scot, and sounded like it. (I met him quite a few times.) If you read the phonetic passages aloud in a cod-Scottish accent they are much easier and clearer, IMHO.

> 'Excession' had a lot of talk between Minds/Ships which was quite dense.

I can only say that I did not find that. It's widely rated as many readers' favourite Culture or IMB novel.

I though that, for instance, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep was harder work, and much as I love Vinge's work, I found Rainbows End unreadable and DNF.

> Also there is a lot of descriptions of hyper-advanced weaponry, drones, etc

Personally I lap that stuff up.

> even though I enjoy the books, it can be a bit much sometimes.

Interesting. For me the reverse is true. I find they make most other SF seem a bit dull and lifeless.

What I liked about Banks' sci-fi is that he generally avoided too much 'info dumping' that some authors suffer from. Like "He was a X'nar'kk from the Blagh'le system ..." for like 3 paragraphs before you get to some actual plot. The only time I saw that a bit was in the Algebraist - funnily enough - in the subplot with Luseferous (diamond teeth, enemy head punching bag). Of course the parts with the Dwellers made up for that ('I do hope you have enough people.').

I guess it comes down to whether all the detail is enjoyable or not. When it's a long description of how a Ship converts the majority of its mass into a swarm of weapon platforms or the rapid sequence of events in a battle between drones over the space of a millisecond then it can be good. If someone was not into that, I guess the extra detail is going to make it worse for them.

Excession IME is fine for people -if- they've read several other Culture novels first. Having it be somebody's first one tends to be ... suboptimal, at best.

Inversions is also weird in that it feels a bit empty ... -unless- you know to read it as a novel about SC agents, and then it's far more interesting.

The rest of the sci-fi ones seem reasonably grokkable, the non-sci-fi ones really depend on whether you get into the style or not, I think.

I've never got on well with the Iain Banks novels, and devoured the Iain M Banks novels.

I started with the Wasp Factory which I used as external reading for my English Literature 'A' level -- I still have my first-edition hardback -- and I moved on to Consider Phlebas and loved all of IMB's stuff. Most of IB's did not move me, although the Bridge and Transitions are interesting.

An alternative might be contracting but these usually require setting up as a LTD, getting insurance, etc. you’ll also have to deal with corporation tax and other admin. The work you’ll get is more or less the same as perm work but with more risks (usually 3 or 6 month contracts, you’re the first to get fired if things get tough)

However day rates in excess of £500 are normal outside of London (£750 in London) so if you can deal with all that it can be lucrative. I use 220 as the number of working days in a year which can put your income north of £100k (ymmv).

Hope that helps, and hope you work it out.

Of course that depends on the type of work you do, your skill and experience level, and the type of client you work with.

In the UK what that day rate is worth also depends on whether you are working inside or outside IR35 and if inside whether you're working through an umbrella company or the client is paying their own taxes. Your £750 and your friend's £750 might give you very different amounts of real money left after taxes and costs.

Dev who solves problem with regex, now has two problems.