Um, no, I think some people really did have a cow when they proposed putting pictures on drivers licenses, or made carrying ID mandatory, or made people get a license to drive a car and that they banged the personal freedom drum.
Irishman:
It’s sad we can’t have a reasonable discussion over the level of security, cost/benefits, etc, without someone interjecting conspiracy nonsense and basically making one side indefensible simply by association of the idiocy spouted by the proponent.
Well, I concur, here’s a data point I’ve linked to in the past, but bears repeating, on CT scan overdoses. And these are better trained than the TSA workers (I think).
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,564926,00.html
Coin_Flip:
As another shocker (or maybe not) there is a letter of concern written by actual scientists that say the measurements of radiation exposure may be off by quite a large amount, perhaps one to two orders of magnitude. The link is found here. (Warning, PDF file.)
I can’t get that link to work in two different web browsers. Can you find an alternate link please?
Powers:
You said “whenever a new control is proposed to thwart how outlaws are thwarting the old control”, you find reactive panty-wadding amusing. The clear implication is that as long as the control is proposed in reaction to circumvention of existing controls, that anyone who objects is being unreasonable.
The logical conclusion, then, is that any control so proposed would be reasonable, no matter how onerous.
Obviously, that’s not true. Some controls are plainly unreasonable and thus should be opposed. So why do you find it so amusing when people complain about a particular control they find unreasonable?
Well they may be clear inplications and logical conclusions to you, but I neither said nor intended to imply either.
MarcusF
November 11, 2010, 12:30pm
44
Try going via this UCSF page . The link on the page takes you to the same pdf on the NPR web site but you may have better luck this way.
The principle technical issue - raised by what look like four senior scientists with relevent expertise - is that the assessment of harm has been based on the assumption that the individual is receiving a whole body dose while in practice, by the nature of the device, practically all of the dose is to the skin.
The physics of these X-rays is very telling: the X-rays are Compton-Scattering off outer molecule bonding electrons and thus inelastic (likely breaking bonds).
Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies (28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.
The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest Xrays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high.
MarcusF:
Try going via this UCSF page . The link on the page takes you to the same pdf on the NPR web site but you may have better luck this way.
The principle technical issue - raised by what look like four senior scientists with relevent expertise - is that the assessment of harm has been based on the assumption that the individual is receiving a whole body dose while in practice, by the nature of the device, practically all of the dose is to the skin.
Thank you. I thought that was the one I was thinking of - Cecil did review their position paper as part of the column, just FTR.
Powers
November 11, 2010, 2:10pm
46
I apologize, then, but I think my question is still valid: “So why do you find it so amusing when people complain about a particular control they find unreasonable?”