Most people are consumers. They watch TV and vegetate. Their participation is limited to online discussion forums of their favorite TV shows. Honestly, it creates work for the producers of art, content, invention, etc. I think the desire to produce vs. consume is in the fiber of each person and cannot be changed.

It is true that the internet has allowed the amateur producers to organize and create works that are much larger and significant than those which could have been made before the internet.

This is ridiculous. I photograph bugs all the time and see all kinds of 'mutations' and they aren't caused by nuclear radiation. They are caused by basic birth defects and the rigors of the environment (birds nipping at bugs, etc).

The level of radiation released in Chernobyl could cause structural mutations and perhaps a few of her drawings from this area are legitimate. The amount released in Three Mile Island could not. Not even close.

Peach Bottom? Get real.

Nuclear power plants are a very clean in the sense that all of the 'pollution' is kept on the premises. An entire year's worth of 'waste' to power 100,000 homes is smaller than your living room. Compare that with coal, oil, or gas which just sends it all up the stack into the air. If we reprocessed fuel like the French do, that small amount would be again reduced more than 90%.

The tiny releases that nuclear power plants do release (mostly tritium), are always blown out of proportion by activists when compared to local background radiation. Remember, your own natural radioactivity adds to the annual doseage of the person sleeping next to you. Perhaps we should all sleep alone?

Remember, the industry that contributes the most radioactive material into our environment is coal. Coal contains traces amounts of Uranium, Radium, Thorium, etc. When you burn it, it goes up and out. Small traces don't seem like much except you burn millions of tons a year.

I won't even get started on the evidence for radiation hormesis (that there is an amount of radiation exposure that activates cellular repair mechanisms and improves health).

Lastly, these are artistic interpretations of the bugs. I love to believe she is 100% faithful, but a photograph might show more clearly that many of those 'deformities' are the result of age, running from predators, etc.

The idea that someone should 'stay in their place' and never venture beyond their original training is utter nonsense and frequently espoused in academia. It is born of jealousy and inadequacy.

I guess Ben Franklin should have remained a printer since he never had any formal training the the natural sciences. Darwin should have kept to cataloging beetles or being a clergyman.

People should be judged on their work. Some people venture beyond their expertise and are wrong (James Watson comes to mind). Many others successfully apply skills learned in one profession to another (The Wright Brothers).

Does Diamond's work serve to further anthropology? Does it further the common man's understanding of human nature? Does it matter if he fails to follow the conventions and language of inaccessible 'insiders' of the anthropological world?

The eyeball flashes were also reported by the Apollo astronauts once they left the protection of the Earth's radiation belts. They reported that it interrupted their sleep. It take a good bit of radiation to make that happen.

As for the radiumscope or spinthariscope, please find it in yourself to resist the radiation = cancer meme. Radiation is complex, there are lots of different kinds, strengths, and they all have different penetrating abilities and hazard levels. Radiation != Cancer.

I have a spinthariscope made from Americium-241. It is very cool and it never fails to impress. Each flash you see is an individual atom decaying. There was a reason these were the top fad item of the turn of the century.

Also, it is completely safe. Alpha particles make the fluorescent screen flash and scintillate because 100% of them are stopped by the screen. Even if it didn't, the moisture layer on the surface of your eye would be enough to stop them.

You can buy a spinthariscope from United Nuclear.

Wow...a blast from my past. I had dinner with Mr. Holdt in 1997 when we contracted for him to do his slide show at our university.

Usually us students would take the speaker/guest out to a nice fancy dinner which was always a treat for us poor students. Mr. Holdt insisted on eating in the dining hall. He didn't want to have anything to do with fancy dinner.

I remember he had a braid coming off the bottom of his beard that was impressively long. At some point during dinner I commented about it and learned that it was older than I.

He was a quiet, calm, soul with respect for all people. I remember disagreeing with some of the starkness of his political opinions and captions. I also remember that, as a middle-class suburban kid, I had never seen people living the way he showed them to me. I think his slide show did tremendous benefit to the 1500 students who watched it that night.

If you ever have an opportunity to see him present, I highly recommend it.

How is it that the ONLY option was removal of the nipple rings? It makes no sense considering that people travel all the time with metallic bio-implants (titanium pins, skull plates, knees, pacemakers, etc)

It makes no sense.

As an aside:

The last time I traveled by plane I was unable to ship my high-speed scientific photographic film ahead of me via UPS. When I asked for hand inspection I was told I should "get a digital camera" because it made less trouble for the TSA.

Trying to explain why they couldn't open the sealed film to inspect it was hopeless. The concept of 'light will ruin the film' was like speaking an alien language.

At the airport, the TSA relented to keep the film sealed as long as each foil pouch could be sniffed by the machine. The guy working the sniffer was sympathetic, "You've got five of these. One is going to set off the alarm guaranteed"...i.e. in his experience the false alarm rate is at least 20%. And, in fact on pouch #4, it did go off, semi-silently.

A few moments later the flanking guards arrived and the explanations led into pat-downs and more questioning.

That pack was sacrificed. "Once it sets off the scanner, I am not allowed to test it again"...i.e. the positive detection ability of the machine is flaky too.

Oy.

This is a war on the unusual and it is very sad.

I wish I could ship myself by UPS.

I used to perform a similar trick back in the 90's when I performed Macintosh technical support at a university. The Macs of that era ran System 7 which was notorious for crashing inexplicably with the little bomb icon and a 'Sorry a system error occurred'.

Inevitably students would have slaved away on a term paper for 6 hours at a workstation when the box would appear. "When was the last time you saved your work?". "Umm, I was going to save it when I was finished, why?"

Well for a long time this meant lots of tears and hair pulling. Then I discovered it was possible to reboot, install the assembly-level debugger from a floppy, reboot again, drop into the debugger and scan RAM for the student's name which was usually at the beginning of the paper.

I could write the next few pages of memory to disk and the paper, sans formatting, would be recovered. People were incredibly grateful.

Occasionally machines rebooted because of power cables being tripped over or a sub-second power drop to the building. Sometimes the trick would work, sometimes it wouldn't. It sounds like modern memory is more resilient in this regard.

IIRC, when power is interrupted, there is enough juice for the processor to push through certain commands, for the hard drive to flush cache to disk, etc. This all happens in milliseconds. It seems as though hardware manufacturers could add a method to quickly write a number of random values to a key portion of memory and thus overwrite the key. You'd need new hardware, but it could be done.

When I first heard about this I figured it was the work of some uninformed low-level bureaucrat and would quickly die. After this latest meeting, I see it is the work of a high-level bureaucrat who should know better.

The regulation of passive sensing equipment is truly unprecedented in our country. It is wrong on so many levels. It is totalitarian and evil.

It also shows an incredible level of ignorance in regards to the fact that law enforcement and counter-terrorism really are minor aspects of our economy. Thankfully they are not yet the unquestioned rulemakers and this should die a quick death.

Just think of all science-fair students building sensors of various kinds. I suggest undercover police officers travel the show floor and make the necessary arrests before our future generation become a danger to themselves with their inquisitiveness.

This is so sad on so many levels and I really feel for this guy. It is a perfect example of how the 'War on Terror' has become the 'War on the Unusual'.

1) When you ask untrained citizens to do surveillance, you get garbage results. Our government's urging people to report 'the unusual' is the first problem.

2) Once law enforcement was tipped off, they were rightly doing their jobs to question Mr. Fazel. It is questionable about their right to detain him though.

3) Once he was determined to be not a terrorist and not a criminal, the matter should be dropped. Now he is marked until the end of our 'War on Terror'. His frustration is immediately assumed to be 'evasiveness'.

Why? Because he wouldn't be on the list if he had been telling the truth. Sounds like the movie Brazil to me. Everyone passes the buck. No one is willing to use their brains to clear this man because of the infinitesimal chance that it will bite them in the ass. This is exactly the Kafka-eske life that a free society should ensure never happens!

4) How can he be refused entry to state capitols? Even convicted criminals can visit once their time is served. Isn't there a guarantee of public access to our government? Can't he pursue redress here? The worst part is that the guards know he is just 'odd' but still 'follow orders'.

IANAL but I this is total BS.

I'm no economist but there are a number of false assumptions being discussed above.

1) There is a different between 'net worth' and 'liquid assets'. I may be worth $30 billion but it isn't available as cash. It is tied up in stocks, real estate, investments in business, etc. Anyone with investments that are large and non-diversified are going to have a problem 'cashing out'. If they try to sell, the value of their illiquid assets will crash. Bill Gates doesn't have $10 billion in cash sitting in a bank account.

2) Some posters above assume that because I hold $30 billion in assets that I am depriving others of its benefit. This is a classic economic fallacy. The economy is not a zero-sum game. I do not make money at the expense of others who fail to make it. When we participate in the economy we grow the entire pie. We don't just make our piece bigger. As mentioned in #1, by investing my $30 billion, I put my assets to work for me and for those who also receive the fruits of my investments.

Case in point: If I work for a start-up and receive a modest salary I get to participate in the economy by spending my earnings on essentials and non-essentials. Where is my salary coming from? It is given to me from part of the investment a multi-millionaire has made in my firm. If the firm fails, I keep the money and the investor gets nothing. If the firm succeeds, I get salary + stock options and the investor gets richer. Win-win.

#3 How much 'stuff' does a person need? None of us are immortal. We all turn to dust.

The top salesman in a firm may wear expensive suits, drive a fancy car, and have a trophy wife. He may bring in $1 million a year. He is a wage slave. The owner probably wears jeans, drives a Toyota, and shaves twice a week. Why? Because he can.

At the time that radioactivity and Radium was discovered, these words had caché which sold product.

The products themselves didn't necessarily contain the materials listed on the label. Similarly, products today are sold as 'titanium' or 'platinum' or 'gold' without containing any of those elements.

There were some products which did contain radioactive materials. Though not healthy and geneally ineffective, they contained a small percentage of naturally occurring low-grade materials (NORM). The exception to this was Radithor: the radium infused tonic which was expensive (because radium is expensive). One gentleman of leisure became obsessed with it and drank himself to an unpleasant death.

Is all radiation bad? Has low-level exposure gotten a bad rap? Lookup 'radiation hormesis' and decide for yourself.