| cycling where I live - if you go on the roads cars either try running you off the road or honk thier horns till you mount the pavement - where instantly as if from nowhere there is someone to say "get offf the pavement".
I'd rather have misserable gits moaning about my being on the pavement than get hit, bashed, barged or run over by a car again though.
Oh and sensationalising the news - that litvenko poisoning for instance... apparently its not enough that he was poisoned with radioactive poison, not enough that due to the rarity of the substance in the world at large it was obviously no accident, not enough that he died after days of agony... they have to use units of measurement that have no direct bearing to make it MORE sensational. They said in the documentary I saw online (the bbc one, was it panorama?) he had a dose of 4 BILLION bequerels of poison. But that isn't a quantity of substance (he recieved approximately 200 micrograms - still thasands of times the lethal dose - thats pretty sensational why not say that?), it's not even the unit used to talk about doses of radiation (rontogens) ... it's the number of radioactive decays per second ... Oh and they said that the hospital wrote down that he wasn't radioactive like it was thier fault - polonium 210 is an alpha emitter, so long as it was fully internal alpha particals would be absorbed by his body, and thus not show on a geiger counter (not only that most geiger counters by virtue of pricing have glass windows in them which don't allow alpha particals through anyway.)... Could they not have decided that the james bond plot was enough without having to use bizzare units to make it sound MORE dramatic? I'm supprised they didn't start using atomic mass units - he was dosed with trillions and trillions of those... |