dorbie

Reminds me of a medical report published on an Australian case. Thanks to google and a few key phrases like 'destroyed ass' here you have it. http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/976876/posts The student of life in your pictures may have gotten off easy. Moral of the story, fireworks and asses don't mix.

That's an incredible contradiction you got going there. Sounds to me like you are counting on the skyhook. Perhaps, poor wording, but I could equally say I'd never count on a reserve not entangling a spinning main and be hoist by the same petard. In a bad situation you might find yourself counting on a lot of things you don't want to. I meant I'd never plan on getting in that situation but actually meant it a bit more strongly (i.e. I really wouldn't want to be counting on it) but ultimately I'd rather count on a skyhook than count on a reserve not entangling a main at that kind of altitude. I think I made my views clear in the body of the post, if you have an alternate view I'd like to hear it. Bottom line you're in a bad place and faced with two unattractive options. So indulge me, overlook my poor choice of words and tell me which would you choose and would you act exactly the same skyhook or not? It seems to me this is one of those situations where the skyhook excells and one reason I would consider it. What would you bet on, a skyhook working or a reserve not entangling/giving you enough cloth out to save you? The central issue here is would you act exactly as if you don't have a skyhook because of some doctrine that says it might fail when your only other option probably has a greater chance of failure? These are very personal decisions I understand, I'm just throwing my thoughts out there because someone said this is the wrong approach and it would be interesting to hear it thrashed out in more detail, by more experienced jumpers. It does seem that the skyhook introduces a low altitude zone with low speed mals where it actually makes sense to rely on it, unlike previous technologies. I'm not saying you don't pull but you are relying on the greater chance of a fast main assisted reserve deployment that changes the altitude at which you'd only pull a reserve for 2 out with no cutaway.

Is that what he did? The way I remember it, after NK announced their weapons program, Shrub invaded Iraq. He wasn't planning on doing squat about NK at the time, until he was called on his hypocrisy by public opinion. If current patterns continue, once they disarm, we will go in and blow the shit out of their landscape, but not before. You need to look at the earlier history. The NK issue has been running for a while, not saying it was good or bad but what happened pre Bush happened and you should understand the result of earlier agreements with NK before proposing new ones. Fact is we tried the $$$ approach and NK took the money, lied and built nukes anyway, deal with it.

Violates the separation of church & state if you ask me.

The assumption was that there was a microgram of ingested material and that was a set of conditions proposed by OTHERS. The word ingested is in the sentence. Geeze dude it's one thing to be pedantic another to ignore a word I wrote in the same sentence you're quoting. Go look at the context there was a context you know. If you try to critique me with this sort of childish nonsense you'll only come off looking silly. The relevant sentence (the one with "only") ends with the first period, after "microgram". And that sentence is incorrect. Period. No reason we should assume anything. Sigh.... Yep no reason you should infer anything from those other words you quoted. Just ignore them. (the explicit "i.e." ignore that too). Oxidation also has the effect of changing the appearance and chemistry of Uranium, do you think I explicitly meant to exclude that too? Like I said things have a context and now you're being impossible. It looks like I've gotten under your skin, and if this is the level of discussion it's time to stick a fork in this thread. It's been fun sir I salute you.

"The only thing oxidation would do is marginally reduce the number of nuclei of U-238 in a microgram. i.e. reduce the radiation per microgram of any ingested material." The assumption was that there was a microgram of ingested material and that was a set of conditions proposed by OTHERS. The word ingested is in the sentence. Geeze dude it's one thing to be pedantic another to ignore a word I wrote in the same sentence you're quoting. Go look at the context there was a context you know. If you try to critique me with this sort of childish nonsense you'll only come off looking silly.

Yep it did that was a mean rate and a slight underestimate, but the effect wouldn't change the ballpark the figure was in as you should know. Additionally there's no misleading anyone with my isotope ratios in fact until your post I'm the only one in the thread who has pointed out that DU is not just pure D-238. DU typically has 0.2% D-235 and that has a half life of 710 million years. In other words it's presence would barely have affected the outcome. I'm puzzled about you raising these to try to attack me, I still say they're reasonable and in the right ballpark but you just tried to imply I've been dishonest over this. Don't you know DU has .2% U-235 and that has a 710million year half life? For a quick back of the envelope calculation that gets us in the right ballpark my results are reasonable and informative and I stick by them. As for the illness syndromes of Vets, I'm all for finding the cause, but depriving them of the best weapon for the job based on hysteria and scarce evidence is not the best solution. P.S. your corrections are welcome but not your attack implying I've been intentionally deceptive

Disgracefully you distort what I wrote, here's the same quote: "The only thing oxidation would do is marginally reduce the number of nuclei of U-238 in a microgram. i.e. reduce the radiation per microgram of any ingested material."

Of course the epidemiological evidence should take precedence, but you don't even know that some assertion of mystery illness is caused by DU. You're assuming it, if you assume the epidemiology with no causal link you've accomplished nothing, but you could claim anything if you start with the assumption that DU is the cause. That document is talking about all sorts of radioisotopes. The Europeans have looked at DU and are looking again and have found nothing. You claim I'm disagreeing with some expert because I'm disagreeing with you. I'm not, it's just another flaw in your reasoning. There's nothing in that reference that contradicts anything I've said. Even with ingested radioisotopes the dosage matters, it's absolutely critical, I've demonstrated with absolute clarity why U-238 delivers a very low dose.

I'm trying, but you keep claiming a different set of "facts," yet you continually fail to document anything. Sorry, unless you can explain why you are qualified as an expert, I have to assume you are just someone who took a Chemistry class before moving on to software. I could be wrong, of course. You might have your PhD. in Chemistry, with radioactive elements being your area of expertise, but you just got bored with it and switched to software. Is that what makes you such an expert? Deal with the facts, dude. The shit is DANGEROUS. In what way, you've offered no evidence of that, just a lot of self reinforcing nonsense. You want to believe it's dangerous and accept everything that says it might be but deny everything that says it isn't. Then you use it as a political tool saying this dangerous stuff is affecting morale. No, your bullshit claims you'd like propagated would affect morale if there's any effect. You say I'm not an expert, big deal, it doesn't affect my calculations above, feel free to run over them and tell me why you think they're wrong. You can't because you know less than me but pretend to have expert backing. I've demonstrated why you're wrong and posted the calculations and all you can do is impugn my reputation. You'll call someone that agrees with you an expert at the drop of a hat "because he read 20 sources" turns out they're B.S. sources that turn out to be hysterical biased diatribes that call DU a WMD, but you'll impugn anyone who offers contrary reasoning.

Explain how a software engineer knows more about DU than the former Director of the Depleted Uranium Project for the US Army, or the team of scientists on the European Commission on Radiation Risks. If I need to know something about software you might be someone I would turn to, but when it comes to the effects of aerosoled DU dust, I will trust the experts in that field. You don't ask a bricklayer about diamonds, you go to a jeweler. Explain to me how a job title restricts someone to a single sphere of knowledge. There are plenty of scientists that disagree with the rubbish you're posting. Deal with the facts dude. At most 3 decay particles in 10 minutes for a microgram. You can try to impugn me but there's plenty of content above that proves to any thinking reader that you're wrong. Again you post no facts or evidence just rubbish and lofty claims.

Oxidation is what produces the aerosol of oxide particles that get ingested. It's the oxidation that makes it particularly hazardous. DU isn't pure U238 either. They can't get all the 235 out. I stated it was ingested that's what we're discussing. Restating an assumption to imply ignorance is a low tactic. I was also the first poster in this thread to point out that other isotopes of Uranium exist in DU and it depends entirely on how depleted the Uranium is, go look at the existing thread. Here's the post: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_view_flat;post=1389976;page=4;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;mh=25;#1393787

Rubbish, oxidation does not affect radioactive decay. Geeze dude you just throw out this nonsense without a clue and imply a danger that doesn't exist. The only thing oxidation would do is marginally reduce the number of nuclei of U-238 in a microgram. i.e. reduce the radiation per microgram of any ingested material. Obviously you're totally unqualified to tell who the experts are. You still haven't admitted any of your errors and stand by your nonsense. All you say in the face of hard facts and explanations is I'm not an expert, no doubt because I don't agree with you, and throw out non sequiturs about oxidation. Get back to me when you can estimate the radiation doseage from a mass of a radioisotope and I might listen to you.

I assume you can support this argument with documentation? First, you might want to check out these: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Groves-Memo-Manhattan30oct43.htm http://www.peacecourier.com/depleted_uranium.htm While I am not an expert on the subject, others that are do not share your conclusions. It's self evident given the known facts, are you incapable of actually considering the irrefutable facts w.r.t. half life, atomic mass and the mechanism of radioactive decay? You have a Microgram of P-238 with back of the envelope calculations; using Avogadro's number and the atomic mass are 6.022x10^23 / 238 nuclei of P-238 in a gram of the stuff. In a microgram it's a millionth. That gives you about 2.5x10^14 nuclei, now half will decay in 4.5 billion years, so let's say ballpark in a year you have 5.5x10^4 nuclei decaying a year. Or about one decay particle every 10 minutes, double or tripple that for radiation from decay products Thorium and Protactinium, Uranium-234 will be irrelevant and for practical purposes stops the decay chain for our purposes. So no it's not particularly radioactive. Hopefully your friend won't plagerize this and use it to lend credibility to his B.S. Edit: there's actually 2.5x10^15 nuclei so it works out at about one decay a minute. Your first link makes absolutely no mention of any form of Uranium. The US did consider radiation weapons. I've read some of the reports and analysis on that. This was mainly through coatings around existing atomic weapons like Cobalt. Their biggest problem was trading contamination against time. In other words the ideal half life was something that wasn't too long so the material would be substantially radioactive but was long enough that it would stay sufficiently radioactive to "salt the earth" for a number of years. P-238 fails miserably as a radiation weapon. It is extra useful as a tamper because it will fission with neutron exposure and increase the yield of an A bomb producing Plutonium as a byproduct that may also fission. Your other link is an activist Peace group with no credibility in the matter. You can post words and opinion all you like but you have shown no evidence of toxicity and now you're focusing on radioactivity which is self evidently bogus to anyone who understands what actually causes radiation and knows the half life. There are several solid facts working against you. P-238 has a huge atomic mass, 238, i.e. you don't get many atoms to the gram relative to other materials, (but OK that's true for a lot of radioactive materials), this matters because you're talking about masses of contaminants in the body, The half life is in excess of 4 billion years, this matters because half the material will have decayed emitting radiation in that period, so over a man's live span infinitessimal mass of the material will actually decay and that infinitessimal quantity will decay with few particles because the large atomic mass meanss it had relatively few nuclei. As per my earlier post there's a decay chain with P-238 but the production and decay of those byproducts is gated by the decay of P238 nuclei. Your other posts have shown an inability or unwilingness to think critically about any of the information in the claims you see. Your only filter is that if it agrees with your preconceptions then it must be correct or expert opinion. You haven't acknowleged any of your posted errors or bogus claims you just keep repeating them. It doesn't take great insight to poke holes in your nonsense, just a little bit of critical thinking, such as the mechanism of radiation and how it relates to half life or the business of contaminants leeching from the body into semen not staying in the body. This is fairly obvious stuff but you won't acknowlege any of it. You just post a self sustaining whirlwind of conspiracy theory with enough innocuous facts to make it sound credible to the naive.

I agree with this point completely, I just think that it is incorrect to define an ongoing terror campaign resulting in the deaths of THOUSANDS of innocents like as a "nuisance"... Are you saying that if those type of incidents were occuring here over the years they would NOT be a "serious threat to national security"? Sure they'd be taken seriously. But, as with the prior Trade Center attack, they might not prompt quite the overhaul in the systems that we're witnessing today. I'm just saying, it's on a whole new level. I'll bet a dumpster blown up by the IRA doesn't drastically affect the UK economy like what happened to the US on 9-11. The IRA changed tactics (I think in the mid 80s) and started bombing stock exchanges and business centers like Canary Wharf on mainland U.K. They also disrupted major highway arteries with bomb scares. I think it started to get expensive. Meanwhile our American cousins counjured up romantic images of freedom fighters and funded child murdering terrorists from a minority faction (at least in Northern Ireland), even as Ghadaffi shipped the IRA boat loads of semtex and other weapons in retalliation for Reagan's bombing run on Tripoli, itself a response to the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 which hit a small Scottish Village (in the Northern part of the U.K.). The worlds a complex place.

MAD works unless the other guy is mad. MAD hasn't failed yet. Even Saddam showed adhearance when he sent scuds at Israeli, but without the threatened chemical payloads. North Korea is building nukes so it won't be invaded. Iran would like them for the same reason. But neither are going to commit suicide by actually using them. If they did, our system that stops not 100%, not 90%, not 30% of a handful of missiles won't stop them either. Giving those two countries 100B each to disarm would even have been a better use of the money. Funding a country with an ideological haterd of us to the tune of 100B does not seem like a good idea. It centers on the assumption that they would actually disarm that's naive and you don't seem to be aware of Clinton's earlier agreements with NK. Not to mention encouraging others to follow suit. Reminds me of the movie "The Mouse that Roared". The US did give aid to NK to stop making nukes. They took it for a few years. There were a few watchdogs who said "wait they're still building nukes. look", but overall the political process ground on unstoppably. In the end the NK government flat out said they had been making fissionable material for nukes all along in breach of the agreement and had the materials to make at least two, at which point Bush woke up and put a stop to the largesse. We'd been extorted then cheated, and now NK was trying some crazy ploy to get more $ even as they were exporting ballistic missliles to the middle east. Unfortunately for NK their ploy involved admitting that our earlier $ bought us nothing.

It appears I mispoke. There is, in fact, an expert in our midst. At least that is the impression I got from his website. While, technically, I don't know him, he does appear more qualified than the author of the paper. So, to Kallend, I offer an apology. What for? I thought I agreed with most of what you wrote: DU does combust on impact, it forms a very (chemically) stable oxide in powder form (dust) that if ingested/inhaled can produce disease. On the whole HEAT rounds cause less environmental damage and less risk to the troops than DU, but they don't work well against reactive armor. Tungsten KE rounds would also be safer than DU. But we have lots of DU left over from decades of making nukes. He didn't just say it combusts on impact he said it begins to combusts in flight. Since you're talking about tank rounds, those penetrators are solid metal darts fired in a sabot they don't even touch the barrel. DU as a penetrator has useful self sharpening characteristics, that's what makes it a great penetrator. DU is the best tool for the job in this case. Alpha particles are harmful inside the body (as hopefully we all learned in highschool) but their numbers are critically important radiation damage depends heavily on statistics. We have all sorts of natural radiation exposure every day including alpha particles inside and outside the body. Microgram quantities from a material with a half life of over 4 billion years and an atomic weight of 238 is not a recipie for high radiation exposure.

Probably not at 8 months. It's probably a healthy baby doing fine as long as it's fed and kept warm. The baby isn't 8 months old, the mother was 8 months pregnant when she was killed and the baby was removed from her womb. The baby needs to get to a hospital. Hope they catch the bad guys and I have a feeling they will. He never said it was 8 months old. Some babies are born naturally at 8 months and manage just fine. Babies have been around a lot longer than hospitals have. This baby does need to get to a hospital, as a normal *precaution*. OTOH we don't know anything about how it was delivered, for example, if the mother was dead when the baby was delivered how long was the baby deprived of oxygen.

My tonysuit came with instructions to wash (on cold I think), the main concern seemed to be color fastnes/consistency between materials if you weren't careful. It should be fine to wash.

Just my opinion too, you may not be under your reserve in the best condition. Let's say you're unconscious or otherwise immobile and your AAD fires and you just float in on brakes, what canopy would you like above you? This has happened to several jumpers.

I hope there'd be no need for them except for domestic cleanup.

PLF's are much better. I'm curious, can you safely plf a down wind landing with significant forward motion? What's best here?

Have they? I haven't seen that. The only person I know who is well studied and current on the topic wrote the paper. Granted he only checked 20 - 30 sources, so he might not know what he's talking about. While individual countries deny the danger, neither NATO, nor the UN support that determination; they claim the danger is real. Well come to think of it I've seen real DU rounds in air, yes they have been. I now see that your paper is a single page (in a big font) of biased bilge littered with inaccuracies and with no correctly cited references. Most of the text is ad hominem references to DU as a WMD mixed with high school physics and hysterical inaccurate & unfounded claims like DU rounds being like mini dirty bombs. The evidence of citations such as they are tell the whole story here, "Metal of Dishonor", "Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets" and "Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War". I've seen this unscientific rubbish on the web before, self supporting hysterical rhetoric does not make any kind of a case. "Inform the people" indeed.

An accumulation of a single microgram is potentially lethal. Check out the attachment There's no attachment. You keep saying that without specificity and you're slippery than a zero-p when it comes to radiation vs toxicology. You quote numbers for radiation that make no sense. Have you actually thought about the decay rate as influenced by the half life and atomic weight? Your arguments are self defeating. If the toxins accumulated in the semen in quantities sufficient to poison a female (who as an aside doesn't actually consume semen, ahem in most cases) the man would quickly excrete the toxins from his body. You can't have toxins present for years yet leeching from his system in poisonous quantities. Then consider that any toxins in semen would more than likely get douched away. THINK about the claims. Europe and the nations there have had many studies of suspected DU poisining, most recently Germany over Kosovo sicknesses, they've found no link. One study does not make the case either, I'm aware of several published government studies that find no link, but try proving a negative. I'm pretty skeptical at this point about any of your claims. I also have no idea what the likelyhood of ingesting or inhaling a microgram of DU is when appropriate precautions are taken. That matters a lot. Your claims about what happens to fired DU rounds have already been refuted.

Define microscopic, and it just doesn't make sense when you look at the half life. Combine the half life with the absolutely massive atomic weight of this atom and you don't have a recipe for a lot of particle emissions per milligram for U-238. The known facts indicate your claim is incorrect. There are many isotopes of uranium and some are worse than U-238, all are going to be present in DU, which is never going to be pure U-238, however you could claim a lot by varying the assumed isotope ratios in DU. DU can be only marginally depleted or almost pure U-238, there's no definition mentioned here. I'd be more worried about the guys mining this stuff day in day out, since natural Uranium seems potentially worse than DU and their level of exposure could be significant.