Smorkian comments

I do this all the time, and I am not a Japanese woman.

But the moral relativism we have had since the 60s is no improvement.

Actually, yeah it is. A vast improvement.

And many, in the decades preceding the 50s, had seen things like life span and quality of life improve vastly

Are you advocating colonial rule? That's just odd.

Yes, yes, so much more satisfying to see Denzel Washington win the Oscar for Best Actor for a film as wretched and disturbing as Training Day than say, what Gary Cooper or Alec Guiness or Yul Brunner won the same award for back in the 50s.

Training Day wasn't a very good movie but Denzel was quite good in it. The Oscars are just awards for Hollywood to honor its own, not a litmus test for the state of the cultural wars.

As long as the rate of extraction doesn't exceed the rate of what's provided by mother nature, it IS renewable.

Even oil is renewable - eventually!

Bury it, throw it in the sea or dump it in Somalia?

Bury it. You bind the cesium to something stable and bury it in a safe location. The increased concentration is a good thing, the residue takes up less space...

Yes, this is good news - the water decontamination system is actually reducing cesium levels, which is what it's supposed to do.

Was the 50's so bad?

Actually, yeah, unless you were a white male. Why do people want a return to the morality of this age? Minorities around the world were treated as sub-human. Large parts of the world were still ruled by colonial powers. Women had few rights (I know you like this part, steve@CPFC). Why should movies today aspire to fit into the morality of that backwards, awful world?

Disaster prep is first and foremost the duty of local and state officials.

Go ask ex-PM Kan if he agrees with that one...

Physical books are designed and laid out by experienced professionals. While there are sometimes errors, the basics of font/typography, layout and expert proofreading are included in the finished product.

Same thing in ebooks. You see crappier products in the Kindle store that you wouldn't see in a normal store because there wouldn't be the shelf space for the crappier ones. But in the Kindle store anybody can publish and distribute, so you get high quality ebooks (most of them)~ and some poorly put together ones.

The ebooks put out by major publishers are the same quality as their paper counterparts.

Physical bookstores are a dying breed and physical books are right behind that trend. You gotta adapt or die, just like the newspapers have found out.

It should be EASIER to survive in the digital world as you don't need to worry about physically printing, storing, and distributing the things. You can concentrate your resources on delivering a quality product.

How much press coverage is this guy going to get? Is his life one big press conference?

Best pitcher in NPB. Better than Darvish.

I believe when one mad cow was discovered in US beef that one country insisted that ALL the beef be inspected before being imported. What country was that? Yes, Japan. If they wanted to, they could.

They insisted on it but it didn't happen. Not all US beef is inspected now, it's just too costly.

Japanese government certainly needs a confidence-building, transparent, and reliable testing regime for Tohoku food products, though. The farmers need the revenue and we need the peace of mind of food we can safely eat.

You like Japanese TV but don't like Japanese movies? That's pretty much the exact opposite of anyone else. There's tons of good Japanese movies to appeal to domestic and foreign audiences but TV? Eek.

There's good and bad Japanese movies to be sure but I think the hit-to-miss ratio is higher than Hollywood, for sure...

Gee, a music festival without all the violence and crime associated with major music festivals in the west? And the music is good?

Count me in.

Such a socio-political bulwark would probably have prevented the world wars and rise of communism while eliminating imperialism at the same time.

Eliminate imperialism via... imperialism. Nice! Sounds like the justifications for the Iraq and Vietnam wars.

I think all of the Tohoku area should be evacuated like Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was only evacuated 30km from the plant, a bit larger than Fukushima. "All of Tohoku" is an area much, much, much larger than what was used at Chernobyl. Tohoku includes Aomori and Akita as well - do you think all these areas should be evacuated? Keep in mind Aomori is minimum 200km from Fukushima Daiichi...

as a Japanese American physicist Michio Kaku says

You can safely ignore what Michio Kaku says. He's not a nuclear physicist or engineer and has a strong anti-nuke agenda.

It never really was being tested. It is sampled. Big difference.

That's the same anywhere in the world for food testing. It's impossible to test all food on the market. It's got to be done by selecting a representative, random sample of the food going to market.

Very terrible situation, and Monterrey is supposed to be one of our safer cities in Mexico

Not anymore, unfortunately. Monterrey's been really bad the past year or two. I have friends with family in Monterrey - they got their family the hell OUT of there.

I rarely use my heater in the Tokyo area anyway. Just bundle up, throw an extra blanket on at home, enjoy some nice nabe.

Dont blame any foreigners in the slightest for leaving if they have no reason to stay. But many of us are invested here, financially, emotionally or both.

Great comment. Everybody needs to make their own decision for themselves and their family. I've elected to stay as Japan is my home and my life is here but others may feel its best to leave, or to mitigate the impact of potential food contamination by eating only imported foods, etc. But I don't see how anyone can be faulted for making the decisions they feel are most appropriate for their situation.

Though I am sad as quite a few of my foreign friends have moved away for good in the past few months...

Damn I didn't realise there were so many nuclear physicists on JT - alot of people here seem to thnk they are pretty up on this nuclear stuff.

Johannes (I believe) and I are both physicists, at least. Probably a few other scientists around, too.

With Hiroshima we can be assured the isotopes were spead around fairly uniformly because of the explosion. But with Fukushima, we can be assured that dispersal is completely non-uniform, with high concentrations here and there.

That's the EXACT opposite of what happened. With Hiroshima the explosion sent irradiated particles high into the atmosphere to be dispersed by low and high level winds. There was nothing remotely uniform about the dispersion.

With Fukushima the explosions were not powerful enough to distribute radioactive particles high into the atmosphere - the radiation is relatively localized. Very bad news for Fukushima and surrounding environs, better news for areas further afield.

'Gee' is a couple of years old - not the most topical parody...

Just curious, what do you think needs to be done before beef can be declared safe? I mean, if you are a farmer in Iwate and you are not feeding your cattle contaminated hay, why shouldn't you be allowed to sell? We need to keep contaminated beef off the market - that is paramount - but at some point the farmers whose cattle are not contaminated need to be able to bring them to market. People need to be able to make a living.

So what do you think - if you don't think Iwate beef should be sold now, when should it be able to be sold? Or should all agriculture in Tohoku shut down for eternity?

And don't jump down my throat, I'm asking a legitimate question.

By the way, the building of aircraft carriers were essential to get back those lost islands from Japan,vietnam, the philipines, taiwan...etc

It is this attitude that guarantees the rest of the world will never allow China to become an expansive power in the Pacific. China thinks it owns everything that has the tiniest bit of resources. Nobody's going to allow them to take over anything.

See what next the Japanese coast gurad will do!

Ask the Americans to force it out of Japanese territorial waters - what else?

she is not as disgusting as those congresswomen in capitol hill!

????? Are there congresswomen releasing songs now?

It's probably impossible to come up with a conversion table for the two scales as they measure two different things. The Japanese scale measures how much things are shaking and the "Moment Magnitude Scale" (MMS - formerly called the Richter Scale) measures how much energy was released by the earthquake. The Japanese scale reading will change depending on how deep the earthquake was and how far from the epicenter the shaking building is at.

Yup, the scales are just different.

Sounds fun. People need to relax and enjoy life.