Would you rather be exposed to the radiation of 1,000 CT scans all in one go, or be hit with the same cumulative amount of radiation, but over the course of a lifetime? worksinprogress.co/issue/how… Hopefully you will not have to take that decision, but if you do, make sure it's spread out over your lifetime. There is now overwhelming evidence that low-dose-rate ionizing radiation is not that harmful. Even Chernobyl, by far the world's worst nuclear disaster, exposed millions yet has likely killed 60 or so people. A total of 200 may die early. The other bad civil nuclear disasters – Windscale, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island – likely killed nobody at all. The evidence is rolling in: ---> Many residents of Kerala are exposed to seven full-body CT scans' worth of ionizing radiation every year. But multiple studies find no effect on their health. ---> Taiwanese apartment dwellers were unwittingly exposed to up 100 CT scans per year because their apartments were made with radioactive cobalt rebar. But dwellers suffered much lower cancer rates than other age-comparable Taiwanese. ---> Between 1915 and 1950, women in factories painted radium onto watch dials to make them glow in the dark. Those licking the brushes sometimes suffered severe cancers. But non-lickers had lifetime doses equivalent to nearly 1,000 CT scans with no effect. ---> At 58 in 1945, Albert Stevens was injected with an enormous amount of plutonium, exposing him to a radiation dose equivalent to 300 CT scans every year. He lived to be 79. These and many other studies show that ionizing radiation's harms are primarily about concentrated acute doses, not low doses over a long time. Yet nuclear regulatory systems are based around the principle that any radiation exposure is totally intolerable. This leads to rules like 'ALARA' – as low as reasonably achievable – which continually ratchet up regulatory requirements, making nuclear power slow and expensive. Read my new piece with @chalmermagne for @WorksinProgMag.

Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated. A new essay by @bswud, @SCP_Hughes & me. Why the UK's ban on investment in housing, infrastructure and energy is not just a problem. It is *the* problem. And how fixing it is the defining task of our generation. ukfoundations.co/

what are some of the most psychoactive tweets you've seen or bookmarked? tweets that basically altered your brain function/chemistry the moment you read them

if u care like at all about "street cleanliness" i think we more or less have nothing in common just in terms of what we value and how we think the world should be

The 'Beetle Wing Dress', which Ellen Terry wore to play Lady Macbeth, is one of the all-time greatest pieces of costume design. It's unbelievably beautiful. By contrast, the rest of the cast were dressed more plainly. Oscar Wilde wrote: "Lady Macbeth seems to be an economical housekeeper and evidently patronises local industries for her husband's clothes and servant's liveries, but she takes care to do all her own shopping in Byzantium."

The "Eco" setting for a diswasher should mean "I'll only start working when there is abundant clean electricity" not "I'll take four and a half hours cleaning your dishes in a slightly shit way."

Be forewarned: If you join a book club looking for serious conversation, you will be sorely disappointed. A large percentage of people will not finish the book but this won't keep them from talking, another percentage will have no interesting thoughts, and the most tedious people will have terrible ideas and conclusions often completely misinterpreting what the author clearly wrote.

What’s spookier than a vampire bat? The HS2 bat tunnel 🦇🚂

whats a ship that pissed you off really badly , im curious to know

These chunky bars are required in new homes by English building regulations aimed at preventing residents from falling out of windows. All windows with sill heights of less than 1.1 metres must have them if they can be opened by 10cm or more.

podcasts are a great *medium* because listening to people discuss something is really natural and easy, but most of the *content* is garbage. audiobooks have good content but the medium is not great because listening to a normal book read out loud is not as natural.

Ryan Gosling reveals that Margot Robbie sent him a gift every day to help him develop his character as Ken: “She left a pink present with a pink bow, from Barbie to Ken, every day while we were filming. They were all beach-related.”

Regulations were recently introduced requiring a minimum window sill or guard height of 1.1 metres. My colleague @RobertKwolek at @createstreets just spotted this new build, apparently an early example of the small squat windows this will generate. Behold the norm of the future.

Jesus Christ was very much cancelled when he was alive, so much so he was crucified

They don't make them like this anymore.

BUT IT GETS BETTER. The grounds on which the application was rejected is that they have a policy that they reject all applications other than those that reduce overall venue capacity. *ON LEICESTER SQUARE*.

The environmental assessment for a 4 mile tube extension in Madrid was 19 pages long. The environmental assessment for a 3.3 mile reopening of a railway line in Somerset was 18,000 pages long.