Scary documentary of the work the brave Russians are doing to investigate and fix the Sarcophagus around the destroyed reactor at Chernobyl circa 1996. They basically have scientists running around in overalls and dust masks (!) in areas of radiation of 200+ Röntgen while hot spots can get up to 500+ Röntgen. In comparison, the limit for most people working with radioactive substances is 5 REM per year (about 4.66 Röntgen, or 0.05 Sv). The former is enough to give light radiation poisoning, the latter gives acute radiation poisoning if you stay too long in there. They were investigating to discover where the fuel for the reactor had gone (the actual reactor is empty) and eventually discovered it had fused with surrounding reactor sand in the basement, part of it is known as the Elephant’s Foot. Underneath the reactor they measured it as 10,000+ Röntgen where any sort of unprotected exposure means a very painful death within about 2 days from lethal radiation poisoning.
Unfortunately contrary to their earlier beliefs of the fuel being stable in the glass like sand, the nuclear fuel is breaking down and mixing with water, scientists in Russia are worried about possible contamination as the Sarcophagus is not hermetically sealed. They hope to be able to form a new superstructure to seal the reactor in and proceed to clear the debris out from the accident without contamination or dust release into the atmosphere.
You can watch the video here.
I was having a look for Fedora Core 7 when I absentmindedly typed in fedora.org to find some bizarre pictures. See more here. I presume thy lady is quite fond of thy cat, no?
Scary to see how doctored some pictures are getting nowadays. See for yourself here. Probably not as severe as the plastic surgery in South Korea, but getting pretty worrying.
Found on one of the daily RSS feeds, kind of amusing!
I recently picked up a 500 GB WD My Book World Edition from OfficeWorks on an impulse buy to start stashing away some extra files. Unfortunately, the thing is abysmally slow at about 5 MiB/sec transfer rates so I guess it’s relegated to being on the network switch to get 2 MiB/sec feeds from my laptop over wireless. However, the good news is that all is not lost - the WD comes with an Oxford OXE800 chip which is a NAS SOC with support on-chip for a ARM 926 200 mHz CPU, 3 USB ports, 10/100 MBPS Ethernet, network co-processor, PCI, serial, SATA and AES-128 encryption. The WD board also includes a VIA 6122 Gigabit Ethernet chipset (not that it reaches that), strange given the Oxford SOC already has it built in.
Using some searching, I quickly managed to access the GNU/Linux on-board so basically I’ve got a 200 mHz ARM CPU that consumes about 14 Watts (about 6c a day) in power for web serving, FTP, BitTorrent or whatever else strikes my fancy. WD even kindly left the gcc compilers and toolchain on the box, so I don’t even have to head out to build one! Talk about nifty. I’ll have to see about speeding it up however, I’d like to get about 10+ MiB/sec from a direct connect Gigabit connection if possible, looks like the DMA and network co-processing isn’t up to scratch by the looks of things. If still no joy, maybe a direct USB 2 to SATA adaptor will do the job, but be nice to be able to use the externally available USB port for that.
Anyhow, check out all the stuff you can do at the wiki here.
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